/ 



y': .r~- 



GERMAN CULTURE 



.GERMAN CULTURE 

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE 
GERMANS TO KNOWLEDGE, 
LITERATURE, ART, AND LIFE 

EDITED BY 

PROF. W. P. PATERSON 



OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY 





CONTRIBUTORS 


HISTORY . 


. PROF. RICHARD LODGE 


PHILOSOPHY 


. A. D. LINDSAY 


SCIENCE . 


. PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON 


LITERATURE , 


. DR. JOHN LEES 


ART . 


. PROF. BALDWIN BROWN 


MUSIC 


. PROF. D. F. TOVEY 


EDUCATION 


. DR. MICHAEL SADLER, C.B. 


POLITICS . 


. PROF. D. H. MACGREGOR 


RELIGION . 


. PROF. W. P, PATERSON 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1915 



^^ 



(c\ 



PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 



PREFACE 

It has long been matter of common knowledge that the 
jl|Germans are an intellectually-gifted, a highly-educated, 
and a most laborious people. It was also understood that 
they were an earnest-minded people. In recent times 
they have put their claim very much higher than this. 
They have become morbidly self-conscious, they habitually 
sit in judgment upon their national character and their 
achievements, and they declare themselves an intellectual 
and moral aristocracy whose civilisation represents the 
high-water mark of human attainment and progress. It 
would be easy to quote in illustration a series of isolated 
passages from philosophers and theologians, historians 
and poets. Even more significant is the strenuous attempt 
which has been made to indoctrinate the popular mind 
with the idea of the surpassing greatness of Germany. A 
good example of this patriotic propaganda is furnished in 
Das deutsche Volksthum, edited by Dr. Hans Meyer. This 
work, which has apparently enjoyed official favour and 
met a large public demand, states that its aim is ''to create 
the conviction that nothing greater or fairer than German 
nationality has appeared in the whole history of humanity." 
As a fact, the band of well-known writers who co-operate 
with Dr. Meyer in paying this compliment to their country 
find the quoted thesis all too modest, and with one consent, 
and with wearisome reiteration, they enforce the lesson of 
the superlative character of German intelligence, virtue and 
valour. 

Even in normal circumstances such a pose would pro- 



1 



vi GERMAN CULTURE 

voke some protest, and possibly some amusement. Under 
present conditions, when the diffusion of the German 
type of civilisation might be thought to be an end that 
sanctifies almost any iniquity as a means, it is not sur- 
prising that the German claim of pre-eminence should 
have called forth a storm of indignation and derision. So 
strong is the resentment of the moment that the hoUow- 
ness of Teutonic pretensions has become a popular topic 
in the newspapers and magazines, and the authority of 
honoured names has been lent in support of the view that, 
in the fields of science, art and literature, Germany is quite 
a second-rate figure, and perhaps not much better than a 
plagiarist and an impostor. Intelligibly human, however, 
as this attitude is, it is as Uttle fair and sane as the estimate 
put upon Germany by herself in her worst accesses of 
megalomania. The Germans are undoubtedly one of the great 
peoples of history, who, Uke the English, combine a share 
of the intellectual and aesthetic endowments of the ancient 
Greeks with the practical capacity of the ancient Romans ; 
and they have made a substantial contribution to the 
common store of civilised humanity. They have made 
some mark — often a very deep mark — in every higher de- 
partment of the life and labour of the human spirit. The 
aim of the present book is to give a somewhat detailed 
account of what Germany has thus accomplished in the 
chief spheres of human activity, and an effort has been 
made to estimate the value of its work without preposses- 
sion or prejudice. 

" German Culture '' is a title which is suitable because 
of its vogue, but it requires some definition. The German 
term to which " Culture '' has hitherto been treated as an 
equivalent is Bildung, This was the usage of Matthew 
Arnold, who meant by culture an individual intellectual 
possession — the quality, and also the contents, of a mind 
which has been refined, discipUned, and stored with the 



PREFACE vii 

best that has been thought and uttered. Kultur is ordi- 
narily used by the Germans where we shoxild speak of 
civilisation. Kutturgesohichte, the History of Kultur, is 
the equivalent of our "History of Civilisation/' The 
shade of difference is sometimes said to be that while in 
speaking of civilisation, we give prominence to its material 
aspect, and think specially of the extension of man's power 
over nature through his discoveries and inventions, the 
Germans shift the emphasis to the intellectual and moral 
side, and think of Kultur as " the organisation of a people's 
life in which the ideals of religion, morality, and science 
come to reahsation." The German vocabulary contains 
both terms, and when a distinction is drawn, it is usually 
in some such way as has been indicated. The Kaiser is 
reported to have recently said that Zivilisation is a mere 
affair of the drawing-room, thus identifying it with civility 
or politeness, and that Kultur means " to have the deepest 
conscientiousness and the highest morality." " My Ger- 
mans," he added, " possess that." The implied reflection on 
German manners may or may not be deserved, but, in any 
case, the Kaiser might have done better for outside infor- 
mation than found on a purely colloquial mode of speech 
as conveying the German idea of civiUsation. Nor is the 
moment at all well chosen for claiming that the Germans 
are the representatives of a higher morality than any other 
nation. We have no reason, though constitutionally rather 
averse from such comparisons, for shrinking from the test 
of our own Kultur by the moral criterion. A large part 
of our case before the tribunal of history just is, that our 
civilisation stands for order, liberty, peace, justice, and 
humanity to an extent that a German world-empire would 
not be likely to do. But it is only a question here as to 
the meaning of a word, and the upshot is that Kultur is 
Civilisation viewed on its higher side. By German Culture 
we shall understand the contribution which the Germans 



viii GERMAN CULTURE 

have made to the ideal tasks and achievements of the 
civiUsed world. 

The contributors to this book have not had the oppor- 
tunity of discussing a general plan and attitude, or of 
comparing estimates and conclusions. Their common quali- 
fication is that it has been their business, in the vocation 
of University teachers, to acquire a knowledge of the sub- 
jects dealt with, and to form a judgment upon the range 
and value of the German labours in their several pro- 
vinces. The common spirit may perhaps be described as 
one of critical appreciation. Each writer is exclusively 
responsible for his own work and opinions. 

W. P. P. 

EDINBURGH, 

t^th February ^ IQIS* 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. Germany and Prussia . . . . . . i 

By Richard Lodge, LL.D., Litt.D., Professor of History in 
the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Fellow of Brase- 
nose College, Oxford 

II. German Philosophy 35 

By A. D. Lindsay, M.A., Fellow and Tutor, Balliol College, 
Oxford 

III. What Science owes to German Investigators . 65 

By Prof. J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., LL.D., Professor of 
Natural History in the University of Aberdeen 

IV. German Literature 161 

By John Lees, M.A., D.Litt., Lecturer on German in the 
University of Aberdeen 

V. German Art 197 

By G. Baldwin Brown, M.A., Professor of Fine Arts in the 
University of Edinburgh 

VI. German Music 231 

By D. F. TovEY, B.A. Oxon., Reid Professor of Music in the 
University of Edinburgh 

VII. The Strength and Weakness of German Educa- 
tion . 301 

By Michael E. Sadler, C.B., LL.D., Vice-Chancellor of 

the University of Leeds 

ix 



^ 



X GERMAN CULTURE 

PAGB 

VIII. Political and Economic Aspects of German 

Nationalism 315 

By D. H. Macgrkgor, M.A., Professor of Political Economy 
in the University of Leeds 

IX. German Religion and Theology .... 345 

By Rev. W. P. Paterson, D.D., Professor of Divinity in the 
University of Edinburgh 



GERMAN CULTURE 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 
A HISTORICAL SKETCH 

By RICHARD LODGE, LL.D., Litt.D. 

Professor of History in the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Fellow 
of Brasenose College, Oxford. 

We Britons are a very insular people. We know very little 
of foreign languages, and we know still less of foreign 
history. One result of the present horrible war is that it 
has created a sudden desire to learn something about the 
state-system of Europe in which we have become so sud- 
denly absorbed, something about the complicated inter- 
national relations and rivalries which have generated this 
earth-shaking convulsion, and above all something about 
this neighbouring state of Germany with which we and our 
aUies have come to such deadly grips. It is the object of 
the following pages to give as clear an account as is con- 
sistent with brevity of the complex historical processes 
which have given rise to modern Germany, to its colossal 
strength, and to its even more colossal ambitions. 

The first need for every student of history is to form a 
clear conception of the proper names which he has to use. 
The ordinary reader, who gets his historical ideas mainly 
from newspapers and from conversation, is apt to employ 
proper names in a very loose manner and without any 
deliberate thought. The two proper names which are most 
prominent in the present chapter are Germany and Prussia. 

A 



2 GERMAN CULTURE 

By many British readers these terms are used as if they 
meant much the same thing, and half the obscurity of 
ordinary ideas about German history arises from this care- 
less identification. Yet, as every German knows, they are 
not identical terms even in the present day, and before 
1871 their meaning is so entirely different that their 
confusion leads to the wildest misconceptions. We 
may take Germany, the wider and more comprehensive 
term, first. The explanation of Prussia, a term which has 
a quite peculiar history, will follow later. 

The first appearance in history of German or Teutonic 
peoples takes us back to the days when the dominant 
power in the countries round the Mediterranean basin was 
in the hands of Rome. At that time these Germans were 
nomad tribes, and there was no country which could be 
called Germany. The conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar 
first brought Rome into contact with German tribes, and 
in the following generations prolonged wars ensued until 
something like a fixed border was acquired by Rome on the 
northern frontiers of the empire in the West. But, as the 
power of Rome declined, this frontier was obliterated, and 
the German tribes were forced southwards and westwards, 
partly by the growth of population and partly by the 
pressure of other migratory peoples behind them. In suc- 
cessive waves Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Suevians, 
Franks, Saxons, Angles, and a host of other tribes, poured 
into the lands which still owned the sway of Rome. In 
spite of the efforts of Rome to tame and employ in her 
service the earlier settlers, the successive hordes proved too 
much for her diminishing strength, and the western empire 
of Rome was gradually broken to pieces. The traditions 
of Roman rule were only preserved amid the resultant 
chaos, partly by the admiration which the great edifice 
had excited in the men who overthrew it, partly by thei 
survival of the eastern capital, Byzantium or Constanti-j 
nople, whose geographical position and strength rendered! 
it unassailable, and finally by the struggle of the Bishops 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 8 

of Rome to maintain the ecclesiastical unity which had 
been associated with the Roman Empire ever since the 
acceptance of Christianity by Constantine and his successors. 

By the sixth century all the western provinces of Rome, 
including Italy, Gaul, Spain, and great part of Britain, had 
been occupied by Teutonic conquerors, and the Vandals 
had actually crossed over into Africa. The victors now 
began to make wars upon each other, and gradually the 
successes of the Franks, the most capable of the tribes 
from a military and a political point of view, evolved some- 
thing like order and unity out of the chaos which followed 
the fall of Roman rule. Combining the virile energies of 
the younger races with the surviving traditions of Roman 
government, the great Frankish rulers known as the Karo- 
lings, who had risen on the decline of the earlier Mero- 
vingians, built up a superficially united and organised state 
in central Europe. The victory of Charles Martel over the 
Saracens, who had overthrown the Visigothic kingdom in 
Spain, made the Karolings the acknowledged champions 
and leaders of the Christianised Germans ; and their ascend- 
ancy was completed when Charles the Great conquered and 
converted the still heathen Saxons. Finally a political 
aUiance with the Popes of Rome to defend common inter- 
ests in Italy led to one of the epoch-making events in the 
growth of Europe, the coronation of Charles the Great as 
Roman Emperor in a.d. 800. From his capital at Aachen 
Charles ruled over the greater part of modern Germany, 
over the whole of modern France, and over parts of Spain 
and Italy, while his imperial title gave him those preten- 
tions to world-wide rule which obstinate tradition still 
associated with the name of Rome. 

But this newly-formed unity of western Christendom had 
little substantial foundation and could not be durable. 
Charles the Great's successors Jacked his ability and his 
strength of character, and the fatal practice of subdivision 
among sons, to which the Germans were long attached, 
proved fatal to the attempted revival of the Roman Empire 



4 GERMAN CULTURE 

in Prankish hands. In the next generation we find the 
beginning of a sphtting up of Charles' dominions in which 
the main divisions of later European states can be dimly 
discerned. Western Francia, in which the Franks had 
never been more than a dominant minority, became before 
long completely separated from Eastern Francia, in which 
Teutonic blood was much less diluted. Henceforth we 
have two considerable states, of which the more westerly 
kept the name of Francia and grew into modern France, 
while the eastern state lost its association with the Frankish 
name and came to be known as Alamannia, as Deutschland 
to its own people, and to us as Germany. Between these 
two fairly-defined units lay a long strip of border territory, 
stretching from the mouth of the Rhine to Italy, which 
broke up into a bewildering number of separate provinces, 
Lorraine, the Burgimdies, &c., and these became a subject of 
greedy rivalry between the larger units on either side of them. 

But Germany and France, as by anticipation we may 
call these larger units, were at the time by no means 
coherent states. Feudalism, which had arisen from a com- 
bination of German and Roman usages, proved in both a 
formidable disruptive force. The dukes and counts, who 
had been the administrative agents of the great Karolingian 
rulers, became practically independent within their admini- 
strative areas under the degenerate successors of Charles 
the Great. For a time anarchy seemed likely to be the 
fate of Europe as it had been on the fall of Rome, and new 
Teutonic hordes from Scandinavia took advantage of the 
absence of any strong central rule to ravage the shores of 
their southern and western neighbours. 

Of the two states which were thus equally threatened 
with complete disruption, Germany was the first to recover 
something like real political cohesion. Under two able 
Saxon rulers, Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great, the 
central authority recovered some of its lost control over 
the powerful vassals, and the latter was in 962 crowned 
Emperor by the Pope. Thus a German prince once more 



J 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 5 

succeeded in regaining those imperial pretensions which a 
century and a half before had been associated with the 
more extensive rule of Charles the Great. By this union 
of the German kingship with the shadowy claims of Rome 
to rule the world was constituted that extraordinary insti- 
tution, the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted in name 
till 1806, although long before that date, in the oft-quoted 
phrase, it had ceased to be either Holy, or Roman, or an 
Empire. 

The history of the Holy Roman Empire, which is still 
one of the most cherished traditions of Germany, may be 
studied in the famous essay by Lord Bryce, which should 
be placed in the hands of every young student of history. 
For our purpose it is enough to state that the combination 
of imperial claims with the monarchy in Germany proved 
ruinous to both. On the one hand, the rulers of the grow- 
ing national states of Europe refused to submit to the 
claims to imperial suzerainty which were advanced by a 
German king. On the other hand, the imperial pretensions 
involved successive German kings in disastrous quarrels 
with the Papacy, which claimed to represent Roman 
domination on its spiritual side, and in still more disastrous 
expeditions to Italy, which led to the neglect and sacrifice 
of German interests and to the weakening of the central 
power in Germany. Further, while countries like France 
and England, and later Spain, were acquiring strength and 
cohesion under hereditary monarchies, Germany became 
steadily weaker and more divided under elected rulers. 
This practice of election, associated by old tradition with 
the imperial office, enabled the German princes, ecclesi- 
astical and secular, to gain dangerous independence in their 
own territories, either by choosing a succession of feeble 
princes to exercise purely nominal rule, or by exacting con- 
ditions from the successful candidates which should impede 
the efficient exercise of the powers of the Crown. 

There were two possible ways in which German unity, 
which had almost disappeared at the time of the Great 



k 



6 GERMAN CULTURE 

Interregnum which followed the fall of the Hohenstaufen 
dynasty in the thirteenth century, might have been re- 
stored. One was to create an efficient federal machinery 
in place of the obsolete and discredited monarchical insti- 
tutions. The other was that a successful dynasty might 
secure such territorial predominance as to make the practice 
of election a mere form and to obtain practically hereditary 
possession of the imperial crown. The latter policy was 
the more obvious, and it was more than once attem_pted 
with a certain approach to success. It was first formulated 
by Charles IV (1346-1378), a member of the great House 
of Luxemburg, which furnished four almost successive 
emperors in the fourteenth century. Although his name is 
usually associated with the issue of the Golden Bull, which 
is said to have " legalised anarchy and called it a constitu- 
tion,'' Charles IV's real achievement was the concentration 
of vast territories in the hands of his family. His aims, 
though frustrated by the folly of one son and the unstable 
ambitions of another, were resumed by the more famous 
house of Hapsburg, which, through a combination of good 
fortune and tenacity, succeeded in gaining possession of the 
imperial crown, with one short break, from 1438 to 1806. 

But the Austrian Hapsburgs, though they acquired vast 
territories, and though they rendered one inestimable ser- 
vice to Germany by repelling the attacks of the Turks, 
prejudiced their position in Germany by extending their 
power over non-German provinces, such as Bohemia and 
Hungary, and later considerable lands in Italy. That this 
bundle of heterogeneous states should have been held to- 
gether at a time when nationality was becoming more and 
more the recognised foundation upon which political unity 
was based, is one of the most difiicult enigmas which con- 
front the student of history. But, however creditable the 
achievement may appear, this expansion eastwards and 
southwards made it impossible for Austria to bring Germany 
under its direct rule, or to revive an efficient German 
monarchy. On the contrary, the most obvious result of 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 7 

Hapsburg rule in Germany was that, while the dynasty was 
gaining power in the east, German interests were steadily 
being sacrificed in the west. The long-disputed provinces 
on the border, the Burgundies, Provence, Alsace, and ulti- 
mately Lorraine, fell into the hands of France. Nor was 
this all. Districts which had once been integral parts of 
Germany, such as the Netherlands and some of the cantons 
of Switzerland, became detached from that kingdom, and 
Switzerland and the northern provinces of the Netherlands 
became independent states with interests and traditions of 
their own. 

The other expedient, federal reform, was only tried in 
the course of the fifteenth century, before the house of 
Hapsburg had risen to its later grandeur. Under Frede- 
rick III and Maximilian I successive efforts were made to 
establish a Federal Council for the administration of Ger- 
many, to create a federal court of justice for the settlement 
of disputes in order to put a stop to private wars, and to 
introduce an equalised system of federal taxation. Whether 
these attempts to substitute oligarchical for personal rule 
had any chance of success is more than doubtful. They 
would probably have been foiled by the resolute resistance 
of the Hapsburgs, who under Charles V secured, by the 
accidents of dynastic succession, a territorial predominance 
in Europe which had had no parallel since the days of 
Charles the Great. But, apart from this resistance, all 
possibility that these experiments might succeed was de- 
stroyed by the Reformation. The rise of Protestantism, in 
which Germany played so prominent a part, completed the 
pohtical disruption of Germany which the Holy Roman 
Empire had already brought about. Charles V, in spite of 
the vast extent of his dominions, and perhaps on account 
of that very extent, which rendered any real union impos- 
sible, was impotent to enforce his sovereignty in a Germany 
which was now distracted by religious as well as by political 
discord. His abdication was a virtual acknowledgment of 
failure. 



^ 



8 GERMAN CULTURE 

From the sixteenth century Germany became avowedly, 
M what it had long been practically, a mere geographical 

expression. The independence of the greater princes was 
recognised in the Treaty of WestphaHa (1648), which closed 
the religious wars in Germany to which the Reformation 
had given rise. It is true that in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries some of the outward symbols of unity 
remained. There was still a nominal emperor-king, there 
was a Reichstag or Diet, and there were two imperial 
courts of law. But these institutions had lost all efficient 
control over the political action of German states. There 
were also the ties of a common language and some not 
inglorious traditions associated with the memory of German 
heroes such as Charles the Great, the Ottos, and Frederick 
Barbarossa. For all practical purposes, however, German 
nationality was a thing of the past, and in the eighteenth 
century German rulers made war on each other with as little 
scruple or hesitation as they made war against other states. 

We must now turn to that other proper name which 
was alluded to at the outset. And the first thing to grasp 
clearly is that Prussia is a rather inadequate and even 
misleading designation for the state to which it has come 
to be applied. The real nucleus and kernel of the Prussian 
state is not Prussia, which gives his familiar title to the 
king, but Brandenburg. BerHn belongs to Brandenburg, 
and not to Prussia, and it would be an aid to accurate 
historical thinking if usage would allow us to call the state 
of which Berlin is the capital Brandenburg instead of 
Prussia. But, as we are condemned to use the current 
term, we may at least understand what it means and how 
it came to be applied. 

Brandenburg was a German province formed in the 
Middle Ages by the union of several marks or border dis- 
tricts which had been gradually acquired by German princes 
as they forced back the heathen Slavs from their hold 
upon the lands lying to the south of the Baltic. The ruler 
over these districts was called the Mark-graf or Count of 



■P GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 9 

Bthe Mark. In the fourteenth century this Margrave of 
Brandenburg was sufficiently powerful and prominent to be 
included among the seven electors who chose the successive 
kings and emperors. In 1356 the Golden Bull of Charles IV 
gave to Brandenburg, as to the other secular electorates, 
the inestimable boon of indivisibility and hereditary suc- 
cession. In 1415 the electorate, after passing through 
several hands, was granted by the emperor Sigismund to 
the then head of the house of HohenzoUern. Under the 
guidance of this famous dynasty, which can boast that it 
has produced fewer weaklings than any other ruhng family 
in history, Brandenburg was destined to achieve its later 
greatness. 

The territorial expansion of Brandenburg was almost 
continuous in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth 
centuries, and the main stages in this expansion must be 
clearly grasped. In the early part of the seventeenth 
century two important inheritances fell to the head of the 
HohenzoUerns. In the extreme west of Germany the 
Elector of Brandenburg acquired the duchy of Cleves, a 
distant but important possession on the Rhine just on the 
important border-line between Germany and the United 
Provinces. A few years later the extinction of a junior 
branch of the house brought in another distant province in 
the extreme east, the duchy of East Prussia. This was a 
fragment of the large Prussian state which had in the 
thirteenth century been wrested from the Slavs by the 
Knights of the Teutonic Order. The last of the Grand 
Masters of the Order, Albert of HohenzoUern, had become 
a Protestant and had made East Prussia into a secular 
duchy for himself and his heirs. But he held it, as the 
Knights had held it in their later and degenerate days, in 
vassalage to the crown of Poland. And Poland had seized 
the large area of West Prussia which cut of£ the duchy 
from the borders of Brandenburg. The duchy was still a 
fief of Poland when, on the failure of Albert's hne, it 
escheated to the Elector of Brandenburg. 



1 



10 GERMAN CULTURE 

In 1640, while Germany was still in the throes of the 
Thirty Years' War, Frederick WiUiam, fondly known as 
the Great Elector, succeeded to Brandenburg and to the 
tw^o outlying provinces which had been so recently acquired. 
He ranks as the first of the eminent builders of Prussian 
greatness. During the war the duchy of Pomerania had 
fallen vacant. The Hohenzollerns had legal claims to the 
succession, but the duchy was in the occupation of the 
Swedes. In spite of the persistence with which the Great 
Elector pressed his claim, he was compelled in the peace 
of Westphaha to acquiesce in the retention by Sweden of 
the larger and more valuable part of Pomerania, including 
the important towns on the coast, and to content himself 
with a fragment of the duchy. But he received no small 
compensation in the cession of the secularised bishoprics of 

|| Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Camin, and Minden, which at 

once strengthened the central block of his dominions and 
also brought them nearer to his still isolated duchy of 

m Cleves. In his later years the Great Elector played an 

active but by no means disinterested part in the general 
politics of Europe, and thus gained for Brandenburg a 
prominence and distinction beyond the limits of Germany 
which it had never possessed before. He also freed East 
Prussia from the suzerainty of Poland, and, but for the 
intervention of Louis XIV, he w^ould have retained the 
Swedish share of Pomerania, which he had actually wrested 

> from that power. At the time of his death, Brandenburg 

might fairly be regarded as being, after Austria, the most 
powerful state in Germany, and as having risen almost to 
the rank of at any rate a secondary state in Europe. 

The Great Elector's son and successor, Frederick I, is 
the first King of Prussia. He owed this rise in rank, not 
to his own abilities, which were below the HohenzoUem 
standard, but partly to the reputation gained by his father, 
and partly to the value which the Emperor Leopold attached 
to the gaining of the support of Brandenburg in the war of 
the Spanish Succession. As he was still Elector and Mar- 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 11 

grave of Brandenburg, he associated his royal designation 
with his distant and as yet Httle valued duchy of Prussia, 
just as the later kings of Italy took their earher royal title 
from Sardinia, and not from Piedmont or Savoy. The 
second king, Frederick William I, is notorious as the im- 
passioned collector of abnormally tall soldiers, but he 
deserves more honourable renown as the careful and 
economic ruler who gave to his rather scattered dominions 
the unifying force of a highly-organised and efficient ad- 
ministration, and also bequeathed to his son a full treasury 
and a well-equipped and disciplined army. It was during 
his reign that Prussia acquired Stettin, and thus gained its 
first important port on the Baltic. 

Frederick the Great, who set himself to make use of the 
forces which his father had been content to inspect and 
accumulate, deserves more detailed consideration than his 
predecessors, partly because he raised Prussia to be one of 
the great states of Europe, and partly because the impress 
which he put upon the state has never been effaced. His 
combination of eminent efficiency in warfare and diplomacy 
with a complete and cynical disregard of all conventions of 
political morality has bequeathed to later Prussian rulers 
the tradition that success justifies everything, and that 
moral scruples, if they impede success, are proofs of con- 
temptible weakness. At the same time the value of his 
services to Prussia, from his own point of view, is incon- 
testable. By resolute action and astute diplomacy he 
seized and held Silesia, which has become the great in- 
dustrial province of modern Prussia. By his heroic resist- 
ance against overwhelming odds in the Seven Years' War 
he not only gained imperishable renown for himself, but he 
raised Prussia to rank as an equal with Austria and as 
immeasurably superior to any other state of Germany. By 
his successful intervention in the Polish question he gained 
the province of West Prussia, and thus linked up with 
Brandenburg the hitherto outlying and indefensible pro- 
vince of East Prussia, from which he took his title. And, 



12 GERMAN CULTURE 

finally, by his resistance to the selfishly aggressive policy 
of the Emperor Joseph II he identified Prussia with 
the championship of German interests and independence, 
and thus took a very important step in the direction 
of substituting Prussian for Austrian ascendancy in 
Germany. 

From the death of Frederick the Great the history of 
Germany and the history of Prussia are closely c ommingled 
together, because it was already apparent thaf all hope of 
reconstructing German unity lay in the estabhshment of 
Prussian headship. Frederick William II, who succeeded 
his uncle, possessed little ability or strength of character, 
but his ministers had been trained under the great king. 
When Prussia in 1787 foiled France, Austria's ally, in the 
Netherlands, and when in 1788 Frederick William formed 
a triple alliance with England and Holland to checkmate 
Austria and Russia in the east of Europe, it appeared that 
the impulse which Frederick had given might carry Prussia 
far on the way towards its destined goal. But at this 
juncture the outbreak of the French Revolution completely 
altered the course both of European and of German history. 
One of its strangest and most unexpected results was to 
bring about an alliance of Austria and Prussia, the two 
states whose previous relations seemed to guarantee irre- 
concilable hostility between them. The aUiance, however, 
proved of necessity to be hollow and insincere, and the 
ill-feeling aroused by the final partitions of Poland was 
fatal to the maintenance of the original coalition against 
the French republic. As soon as the success of France 
became assured, Prussia deserted her ally and adopted for 
the next ten years an ignominious but not unprofitable 
policy of neutrality. 

In the second coalition against France Prussia stood 
obstinately aloof, and the victories of Bonaparte and the 
establishment of the French Empire failed to induce her to 
strike a blow for the threatened interests and honour of 
Germany. When at last the intolerable insults of Napoleon 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 13 

drove Prussia to take up arms, she had to pay a heavy 
penalty for the sluggish stagnation which contrasted so 
strongly with the brisk resolution of Frederick the Great. 
The first opportunity of striking a blow was lost by a pre- 
posterous delay which allowed Austria to be crushed at 
Austerhtz. And the tardy rupture with the imperious 
conqueror was followed by the crushing blows of Auerstadt 
and Jena. The treaty of Tilsit marks the nadir of the 
humbled state. Deprived of many of her recent acquisi- 
tions and with her fortresses occupied by foreign garrisons, 
Prussia was reduced to abject impotence. 

But the very magnitude and shock of the disaster 
brought salvation to the shattered state. Great men, like 
Stein and Hardenberg, introduced much-needed social re- 
forms, including the abolition of serfdom. Scharnhorst and 
Gneisenau undertook the reconstruction of the army on the 
basis of compulsory service. Even the stubbornly con- 
servative nobles and gentry of Brandenburg, the Junker 
party of modern Prussia, submitted to changes which in 
ordinary times they would have doggedly resisted. And 
the spirit of resistance which was kindled in Prussia spread 
with startling rapidity through other provinces of Germany 
which suffered from the foreign yoke. Poets and professors 
combined to teach to Germans the supreme duty of re- 
storing freedom to their common fatherland. With the 
desire of liberty came a passionate demand for national 
unity, the lack of which was rightly regarded as the cause of 
all their misfortunes. The opportunity for fulfilhng some 
of their hopes came when Napoleon and the scanty remnant 
of the grand army returned from their fatal march to 
Moscow. The '' war of liberation " which followed is one 
of the glorious episodes in the history of Germany ; and 
the leader in the war was Prussia. Austria, though she 
had fought more stubbornly against France in the past 
than Prussia had done, played a far less heroic part in the 
final struggle. On the contrary, guided by the calculating 
craft of Metternich, Austria held aloof till the last moment 



■ 



14 GERMAN CULTURE 

in order that she might dictate her own terms as the price 
for throwing her sword into the balance. ^| 

The Germ.any which emerged from the Napoleonic wars 
w^as in many ways very different from the Germany of 
the eighteenth century. The Holy Roman Empire had 
perished, and with it had gone the obsolete and useless 
machinery which had been for so long associated with it. 
The number of separate states had been enormously 
diminished. Of the old ecclesiastical principalities, free 
cities, and knights, hardly any remained. Their lands had 
been '' mediatised," or in other words, annexed by their 
more powerful neighbours. In themselves these changes, 
though they diminished disunion, did not tend directly 
towards union. The great princes, stronger than ever 
owing to their annexations, were not likely to sacrifice their 
independence to bring about unity, now that the pressing 
danger of French aggression was removed. But the greatest 
change was the stirring of a new spirit of liberty and 
nationality in the breasts of the hitherto divided and 
submissive peoples of Germany, and the growth of a 
national literature to voice these aspirations. It remained 
to be seen whether the impulse which Germany had re- 
ceived from the war of liberation would be strong enough 
to constitute a new and vigorous Germany out of the 
surviving fragments of the shattered empire. The one 
state which could guide and profit by such a measure of 
reconstruction was Prussia, and there were a few men 
sanguine enough to hope that she would seize the golden 
opportunity. 

It was soon apparent that the aspirations of the people 
were not to be realised at present, and that Prussia was 
neither enlightened nor unselfish enough to head a popular 
movement towards German unity. The princes had en- 
couraged the rising of the peoples against Napoleon so long 
as their own interests were identical with those of their 
subjects, but they were at heart as jealous of their own 
privileges as of their own independence. They found an 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 15 

able and astute leader in Metternich, who succeeded in 
dominating and largely in dictating the settlement effected 
by the Congress of Vienna. Representing a state whose 
very existence was a negation of the doctrine of nationality, 
Metternich could not possibly yield to the popular demand 
for a national union of Germany. In such a union Austria 
could find no place except by the impossible sacrifice of 
her non-German dominions. Under his guidance Germany 
was reconstituted as a loose confederation of princes rather 
than of peoples, and Austria retained a preponderance 
which she had done little to deserve. A revival of the 
Holy Roman Empire, which some ardent nationaUsts sug- 
gested, would have been preferable to the Bund of 1815. 

To the disappointment and chagrin of enthusiastic 
patriots, Prussia not only acquiesced in this settlement, 
but co-operated with Austria in effecting and maintaining 
it. This apparent subservience, however, was not unpro- 
fitable. The year 1815 was a year of disappointment to 
Germany, but it is a distinguished year in the annals of 
Prussia. It is true that Frederick William III had by his 
agreement with the Czar to give up those Polish districts 
which had been detached from Prussia in 1807 to form the 
Grand Duchy of Warsaw. But the compensation for this 
loss was ample, and from the point of view of future influ- 
ence in Germany more than ample. Not only was a huge 
slice of Saxony annexed to Prussia, but the ecclesiastical 
principalities along the Rhine Valley, from Coblenz down 
to the frontier of Holland, were also given to that state. 
As Austria at the same time resolutely refused to take back 
the southern Netherlands, the defence of the most vulner- 
able frontier of Germany against any future aggression on 
the part of France was henceforth entrusted to Prussia. 
This " Wacht am Rhein '* associated Prussia more closely 
than ever with the championship of Germany, and the 
nationalists who bewailed the inadequate results of the 
war of liberation could console themselves with the thought 
that their triumph was only deferred. 



16 GERMAN CULTURE 

Little more than thirty years after 1815 the longed-for 
opportunity to reunite Germany under Prussian leadership 
seemed once more to present itself. In the interval be- 
tween 1815 and 1848 the twin offspring of the French 
Revolution, liberalism and nationality, which Metternich 
had sought to strangle, had made very significant advances. 
And to contemporary observers it seemed as if the two 
forces were indissolubly united. The achievement of inde- 
pendence by Servia and Greece, the overthrow of the 
Bourbons by the July Revolution, the success of Belgium 
in severing the ties which had bound it to Holland, were 
all events which stimulated the more ardent spirits in 
Germany to believe that the future was on their side. It is 
true that a Polish rising had been suppressed, but, on the 
other hand, both in Spain and in Portugal constitutional 
principles had gained ground by the defeat of Don Miguel 
and Don Carlos, and the triumph of the Whigs in Britain 
when the Reform Act was passed in 1832 seemed to put a 
final end to the time when British influence had been on 
the side of authority against liberty. But the more 
Metternich's system lost ground in Europe, the more 
resolutely did he resist any attempt to reform the constitu- 
tion of Germany. And, on the whole, he was successful. 
In a few separate states, such as Baden, constitutions based 
upon liberal principles were conceded, but in Germany 
generally the interests of the princes led them to support 
Austria, and the Bund, in spite of its glaring defects and 
anomalies, remained unreformed and almost unshaken until 
1848. 

The one serious danger during this period was that 
Prussia might be induced to espouse the cause of the re- 
formers. From this danger Metternich escaped by securing 
the interested complicity of Fredeiick William III and 
Frederick William IV. Both these kings — the one from old 
prejudices imbibed at the time of the French Revolution, 
and the other from attachment to the doctrine of divine 
right — continued to maintain the cause of reaction in 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 17 

Europe. When France and England after 1830 were drawn 
together by their joint championship of Belgium and of 
liberal and national principles, Austria, Russia, and Prussia 
formed a powerful counter-league to resist principles which 
were still denounced as savouring of Jacobinism and as 
leading to revolution. And yet the liberal party in Ger- 
many continued to look to Prussia for countenance and aid, 
though they received nothing but rebuffs in return. They 
did so because without Prussian support they had no hope 
either of success or of security against Austrian measures 
of repression. Metternich could chuckle in security over 
what seemed to him the folly of his adversaries. But, 
looking back, we can see that the folly was not wholly on 
one side. Metternich and his opponents both made a 
fundamental misconception. Neither perceived that liber- 
alism and nationality, in spite of their close historical 
association, were really quite distinct forces, and that the 
latter could triumph without the aid of the former. Prussian 
kings and Prussian nobles and gentry were almost instinc- 
tively anti-liberal, but they were not therefore anti-national. 
The interests of Austria and Prussia, in spite of their 
apparent alliance, were really diametrically opposed, and 
at the very time that Prussia was giving the cold shoulder 
to liberal aspirations in Germany, she was taking steps 
which facilitated her subsequent acquisition of the German 
headship. These measures were economic rather than 
political. The still scattered character of her dominions 
made Prussia impatient of the hindrances to trade caused 
by geographical boundaries. In order to secure the free 
passage of goods from one province of Prussia to another, 
it was necessary to secure their free passage through the 
intervening territories. Hence the series of treaties with the 
other German states which ripened into the famous Zoll- 
verein, or customs union. Hence side by side with the 
loose political confederation or Bund there grew up a far 
closer and more efficient economic federation in Germany, 
and not only was Prussia the head of the one as Austria 

B 



18 GERMAN CULTURE 

was the head of the other, but from the Zollverein Austria 
was jealously excluded. 

In 1848 the long looked-for opportunity of the national 
liberal party seemed at last to have arrived. The whole of 
the edifice which Metternich had laboriously constructed 
and maintained was swept away by a spate of revolutions 
The veteran statesman himself was forced to fly to England 
by a mob rising in Vienna. Frederick William IV gaveJ 
way to the rioters at Berlin and conceded a constitutionl 
which he had refused to grant the year before. The lesser' 
rulers found it impossible to withhold similar concessions, 
The triumphant liberals now set to work to frame a new- 
constitution for a united Germany. With the consent of 
the Diet, a national parliament chosen by popular vote, 
and not a mere collection of the nominees of princes audi 
governments, met at Frankfort in May, 1848. After a pro- 
longed contest between the Great German party, which 
desired the continued inclusion of Austria, and the Little 
German party, which aimed at its exclusion, the latter 
prevailed, and the Empire of a reconstituted Germany was 
formally ofiered to the Prussian King in 1849. The answer 
was an unhesitating refusal, and in the general reaction 
which followed the first triumphs of the revolutionary 
movement, the Parliament of Frankfort was dissolved.] 
But Frederick WiUiam, though he had rejected the offer of 
a crown from a revolutionary assembly, was not without 
hopes of profiting by the overthrow of the constitution of 
1815. These hopes, however, were also doomed to dis 
appointment. Austria, which had crushed the Itahan 
rising by its own strength, and had defeated the Hungarian 
rebels with the aid of Russia and the Slavs, was determined 
to complete its triumph by the recovery of its old ascend- 
ancy in Germany. Prussia was forced to submit, and in 
1850, at the humiliating conference at Olmiitz, acquiesced in 
the restoration of the Bund. German unity seemed to be 
as far off as ever. 

The events of these momentous years were watched 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 19 

with the keenest interest by a young man who was destined 
to play a part in the subsequent shaping of German union. 
Otto von Bismarck. Born in 1815 of a typical Junker 
family in Brandenburg, he combined the prejudices and 
tenacity of his class with a keenness of perception rarely 
granted to men of iron will. He had growled his disap- 
proval when the King, more pliant than most of the 
HohenzoUerns, had granted a Prussian constitution and had 
shown a willingness to coquet with the national hberals at 
Frankfort. All the greater was his exultation in 1849 
when Frederick William, in his own words, refused to " pick 
a crown out of the mud.*' Even the convention of Olmiitz, 
humiliating as it was to Prussia, pleased him, because it 
removed the taint of an alliance with the liberal party in 
Germany. From this time his own line of action was 
clearly marked out. Germany was to be united, not by 
the absorption of Prussia into Germany, but by the absorp- 
tion of Germany into Prussia. And this object, the very 
antithesis of the ideal cherished by the German liberals, 
must be achieved by methods wholly opposed to those of 
liberalism. Germany must be created, in the words of his 
famous utterance, ''not by speeches and votes, but by 
blood and iron.'' Twelve years, however, were to elapse 
before he had the power to carry his principles into practice. 
Although the refusal of the imperial crown in 1849 is 
m event of cardinal importance, and although it gave a 
minister twist to the subsequent development of Germany 
md to the relations between Germany and Great Britain, 
t must not be concluded that there was no justification 
:or that act. It is quite possible to contend that Frederick 
William had no alternative but refusal, that the Frankfort 
Parliament had not shown such wisdom as to justify 
icceptance of the constitution which it had framed, that 
nost of the German princes would have condemned such 
icceptance, and that it would have involved a war with 
Austria for which Prussia was not yet prepared. Nor were 
he full consequences of the refusal made clear for some 



20 GERMAN CULTURE 

time to come. The preponderance which Austria had re- 
covered in 1850 was weakened by the Crimean War and 
by the death of the Czar, Nicolas I. When in 1857 ^^^ 
insanity of Frederick WiUiam IV gave the regency to his 
brother WiUiam, there were, for a time, renewed hopes that 
Prussia might make at any rate a partial alliance with the 
reviving forces of liberalism. It is true that the Prince had 
been regarded as the opponent of reform in 1848, and had 
been driven from Berlin to England by the enmity of the 
revolutionary leaders. On the other hand, he was a soldier 
rather than a politician, and his first act was to choose a 
ministry acceptable to the liberal majority in the Prussian 
parliament. In the following year the marriage of his son 
to the Princess Royal of England was eagerly welcomed as 
bringing about an alliance with the country which w^as 
regarded as the example and the champion of constitu- 
tional government. The confident hopes thus engendered 
were further stimulated by the alliance of France with 
Piedmont and by the defeats of Austria at Magenta and 
Solferino. The most enlightened princes of Germany, with 
the Grand Duke of Baden at their head, thought the time 
had come for transforming the loose confederation of 1815 
(Staatenbund) into a more centralised and coherent federa- 
tion (Bundesstaat) , With Austria weakened and discredited, 
nothing but the support of Prussia was needed to bring 
about a substantial measure of German unity. But this 
Prussian support was not forthcoming. 

In 1861 WiUiam I succeeded to the Prussian throne on 
the death of his brother, and in the following year he be- 
came involved in a quarrel with his parliament over a 
scheme of army reform devised by Roon. The Parliament 
refused to grant the necessary suppUes, and the liberal 
ministers advised the abandonment of the proposal. But 
to WiUiam I the army was pecuUarly under the care of 
the Crown, and all his instinctive antagonism to constitu- 
tional government was revived. Dismissing his pusillani- 
mous ministers, he appealed to Bismarck, who had made 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 21 

himself notorious when he represented Prussia in the Diet 
by his calm assumption of equality with the Austrian 
representative, and who was avowedly hostile to anything 
hke parHamentary control. With the King's support, and 
in spite of the disapproval of the Crown Prince and Princess, 
he carried on the government in defiance of the hostile 
majority. When the ParHament refused to vote supplies, 
he levied those which had been voted the year before, and 
contended that this was not a breach of the constitution. 
Thus he broke away from the liberal principles which for 
the last five years seemed to have gathered strength in 
Prussia. But he remained a nationalist, in the sense that 
he desired the unity of Germany. That unity was to be 
made by Prussia on its own terms, and this could only be 
accomplished by " blood and iron,'* or, in other words, by 
successful war. And in less than ten years he had suc- 
ceeded in achieving what half a century of peace and 
constitutional effort had failed to bring about. 

The three successive wars by means of which Bismarck 
succeeded, not only in uniting Germany and excluding 
Austria from the union, but also in aggrandising Prussia so 

I unduly as to make the rest of Germany little more than a 
dependency of Prussia, constitute the most familiar chapter 
in modern German history, and there is no need to describe 

I them in detail. The most striking characteristic of his 
policy is the deliberate and cold-blooded manner in which 

i he sacrificed human life and all regard for political morality 
to gain his ends. Frederick the Great was his avowed 
model, but the pupil was at least the equal of his master. 
He began by picking a quarrel with Denmark over the 
vexed question of the duchies of Schleswig and Hoist ein. 
The purely legal aspects of this complicated question inter- 
ested him as little as the legality of his claims in Silesia 
interested Frederick the Great. He had in this matter 
German sentiment on his side, and he induced Austria to 
become his accomplice. The mihtary difficulties were in- 
significant. Russian acquiescence had been secured before- 



22 GERMAN CULTURE 

hand when Prussia lent a hand to suppress a Polish rising 
in 1863. The other states did not venture to translate 
their sympathies with Denmark into action. The duchies 
were occupied and by the convention of Gastein in 1865 
Prussia undertook the administration of Schleswig and 
handed over the government of Holstein to Austria. 

This arrangement was avowedly provisional, as Bismarck 
had no intention of consenting to a permanent partition of 
the spoil. To secure the duchies and to put a final end to 
Austrian ascendancy or even rivalry in Germany, another 
war was necessary. To bring this about was a more diffi- 
cult task. The King was against him, and so was public 
opinion in Prussia. The lesser states of Germany were 
almost certain in such a quarrel to side with Austria. But , 
the greater the obstacles, the more obstinate was thej 
determination of the minister to overcome them. He had 
supreme confidence in the efficiency of the Prussian army 
as reorganised by Roon and Moltke. He staked his whole 
future career upon this Austrian war, and he gained thereby 
the greatest of his personal triumphs. By persistent and 
ruthless diplomacy he left Austria no alternative but com- 
plete humiliation or war. The war of 1866 was one of the 
most rapid and decisive contests ever fought between two 
great powers. Within seven weeks not only were the 
recalcitrant German states reduced to submission, but the 
Austrian army was routed on the fatal field of Sadowa. 
And the settlement which followed the war was perhaps 
an even greater triumph for Bismarck than the actual 
struggle itself. Schleswig and Holstein were of necessity 
the prize of the victor, who was thus enabled in later years 
to construct the Kiel Canal. In addition, Prussia annexed 
Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, and the free city of Frank- 
fort -on-Main. This immensely aggrandised Prussia became 
the head of a North German Federation which included all 
German states north of the Main. In this new federation, 
a far more highly-organised unit than the Bund, which was 
now dissolved, Prussia had absolute control of foreign 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 28 

policy and of military resources, which were henceforth 
organised and disciplined on the Prussian model. Even 
more creditable to Bismarck's statesmanship was the 
moderation shown to the defeated state. Against the wishes 
of the Prussian King, who was carried away by the success 
of a war which he had only half-heartedly approved, Austria 
escaped without a military occupation of Vienna, without 
the payment of an indemnity, and with no territorial loss 
except that of Holstein. By this means Bismarck avoided 
making Austria into an irreconcilable enemy, and paved 
the way for a future alliance which might convert her into 
a useful tool. 

Bismarck had now two outstanding problems to deal 
with. The great South German states were still inde- 
pendent, and on the grounds of religion, of tradition, and 
of popular temperament, they were less likely than their 
northern neighbours to consent to anything that savoured 
of subjection to Prussia. And outside Germany there was 
a jealous and dissatisfied France. France, under the Second 
Empire, had come to regard itself as so far the dominant 
power in Europe that no great changes on the Continent 
were to take place without her having a voice in them. 
Napoleon III had never intended to allow Austria to be 
crushed. But he had overestimated the military strength 
of Austria, and that power had been defeated before he 
could make up his mind to intervene. And the subsequent 
settlement was still more alarming. It was entirely opposed 
to the interests of France that Prussia should gain such an 
increase of strength, and still more that she should link up 
the Rhenish provinces with the central dominions of the 
monarchy. To acquiesce in such a settlement without 
claiming some compensation for France would complete 
the discredit in which the Empire was already involved 
by the failure of the Mexican adventure. With ultra- 
Machiavellian astuteness Bismarck set himself to make the 
one problem solve the other. French ambitions were of 
necessity opposed to German interests, and a successful 



24 GERMAN CULTURE 

war with France would overcome the obvious objections of 
the South German states to union with Prussia. By feign- 
ing wiUingness to find some satisfaction for Napoleon, he 
induced the Emperor to state his demand for the Rhine 
frontier. This demand was communicated to Bavaria and 
Wiirtemburg, and these states were thereby induced to 
make secret treaties with Prussia. It now remained to 
force France into war, and, in the state of public opinion 
in France, this was not a difficult task. A foohsh attempt 
on Napoleon's part to seize Luxemburg was frustrated by 
Prussian opposition, and relations became more strained 
than ever. The breakirg-point was reached when Spain 
proposed to place a Hohenzollern prince upon the vacant 
throne of that country. The actual candidature of the 
prince was withdrawn, but when France pressed for a 
promise that it should never be revived, any further con- 
cession w^as refused. Bismarck claimed to have altered the 
wording of the telegram in which this refusal was announced 
so as to make it read as an insult to France. But such 
ingenuity was unnecessary. A strong party in France was 
eager for war, and Napoleon III, ignorant of the military 
weakness of his country, was impotent to resist it. The 
war was essentially in its origin a war between France and 
Prussia, but Bismarck succeeded in making it a war be- 
tween France and Germany. France was crushed as 
Austria had been crushed, and treated much more harshly 
than Austria had been treated. But Bismarck's main pur- 
pose was achieved, not when the Empire was overthrown, 
nor when the French Republic was forced to purchase 
peace by the cession of Alsace and most of Lorraine, but 
when, on January i8, 1871, on the unanimous invitation 
of the princes of Germany, William I accepted the title of 
German Emperor. 

" Blood and iron *' had done their work. Germany, 
with the exception of the German provinces of Austria, 
was united under Prussian headship, and Bismarck was 
hailed as one of the two great constructive statesmen of the 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 25 

nineteenth century. It is inevitable that his work should 
be compared with that of his only rival, Cavour. At first 
sight, the instinctive preference of the ordinary student is 
for Bismarck. His is the more imposing figure, and he 
seems, in his brutal and cynical parade of strength, to 
bestride Europe like a colossus. Beside him the maker of 
Italy appears almost puny, and little more than a subtle 
and not very honest schemer. But if one analyses the 
situation rather more closely, and if one compares the 
position of Prussia after 1815 with that of Piedmont at the 
same time, and still more the strong tendencies towards 
unity in Germany with the formidable dividing forces in 
Italy, the original judgment tends to be modified, and the 
task of Cavour appears as the greater and more difficult. 
But the contrast between the manner in which these two 
great men carried out their unifying work is perhaps more 
important than the contrast between the men themselves 
or between their respective tasks. Each step in advance 
towards the unity of Italy was taken with the express 
approval of the people concerned. The Prussian statesman 
deliberately refused to build upon such a foundation. ** Not 
by speeches and votes, but by blood and iron." Cavour 
could not have uttered such words, for Piedmont had not 
the military preponderance which Prussia possessed, but 
the sentiment expressed in these words was the very 
antithesis of his own policy. It will remain for the his- 
torian of the future to determine which of the two great 
builders was the wiser in his choice of a foundation. 

Human nature is so constituted that the popular verdict 
upon political action is inevitably determined by its success 
or its failure. Because Germany was united in a particular 
way, men jump to the conclusion that that was the only 
way in which union could have been brought about. Be- 
cause German unity had been long desired, and because 
since its achievement it has brought fame, power, and 
prosperity to Germany, therefore the methods by which it 
was brought about must be defensible and probably ad- 



26 GERMAN CULTURE 

mirable. If similar methods are necessary to maintain this 
union, and all the material advantages which have accom- 
panied it, then by all means such methods must be adopted. 
Such instinctive arguments as these go far to explain some 
of the most puzzling problems of modem Germany. Why 
are the Germans, naturally very diverse in character and 
in outlook on life, so unanimous on certain questions, and 
so submissively receptive of opinions dictated from Berlin ? 
Why has the South German, a peaceful, placid, pleasure- 
loving man, submitted to be Prussianised ? Why is it, not 
only that Prussia was allowed to swallow Germany, but 
that Germany has not resented it ? The answer is that the 
average German, with his power of acquisition and his love 
of systematised knowledge, is the most teachable of men. 
And the South German is also one of the most sentimental 
of men. What he loves is a legend, something which 
becomes part of his very nature. Bismarckism, and the 
conviction that Bismarckism was needed to create German 
unity and German greatness, have become such a legend ; 
and in forty years, thanks to the pressure of a highly-organised 
military system and an equally highly-organised system of 
State-guided education, this legend has become a gospel. 

It is extremely difficult to cast doubt upon a legend 
which has been piously accepted by a whole nation, and 
perhaps still more difficult to plead for a hypothesis against 
the evidence of accomplished fact. And yet it may be held 
with some confidence that a united Germany — not pre- 
cisely the modern Germany, but perhaps a better and more 
balanced state — could have been created without the em- 
ployment of the crude and brutal measures of Bismarck, 
It is not necessary to lay too much stress upon the Parlia- 
ment of Frankfort and the refusal of 1849. But in subse- 
quent years there were powerful efforts to bring about 
German unity under Prussian leadership {Bundesstaat mit 
preussischer Spitze), and these only required the resolute 
and cordial support of Berhn to be successful. The years 
in which the prospects of success were brightest were from 



I 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 27 

i860 to 1862, after Austria had been beaten in Italy and 
before Bismarck came into office. At this time a German 
constitution on sound federal lines was drafted by respon- 
sible princes and ministers, and could have been accepted 
without any of that taint of democracy which had been so 
distasteful in 1849. But Prussia coveted supremacy, and 
not mere ascendancy, and refused all support to a constitu- 
tion which was not due to its own initiative. Bismarck 
had recourse to a violent surgical operation to bring about 
a result which might easily have been effected by ordinary 
medical treatment. 

The choice made by Prussia between the alternative 
methods of uniting Germany is not a mere matter of aca- 
demic interest. It has profoundly affected not only the 
subsequent development of Germany, but also the relations 
between Germany and this country. Britain was as keenly 
interested in the success of German aspirations as it was 
in the cause of Italy. The well-known sympathies of Queen 
Victoria and Prince Albert were on the same side. But 
Britain has acquired by its own experience a strong pre- 
dilection for constitutional methods of effecting political 
change. A frank co-operation between Prussia and the 
national liberal party in Germany would have had the 
cordial approval of British opinion. But when Bismarck 
openly repudiated all alliance with that party, when he 
paraded his hostility to the Crown Prince and Princess, 
and when the triumph of Germany was associated with the 
harsh treatment of France, British sympathy was cooled, and 
a sense of alienation arose which has never been removed. 

Englishmen who are old enough to remember Germany 
some forty or fifty years ago cannot fail to be impressed 
by the subtle change which has come over the national 
character. In those days Germany was a paradise for the 
traveller of moderate means. Music and the drama were 
the recreations of a people whose simple family life was 
singularly refreshing and restful. Nowadays Germany is 
a wealthy and dominant state, but its life, especially in 



28 GERI^IAN CULTURE 

the larger towns, has lost most of its attractions to the 
traveller in search of peace. Berlin has become a centre 
of dissipation, only diftering from that of Paris or Vienna in 
its cynical coarseness. Everywhere the military dominates 
the civil element in social life. This change was foretold 
at the outset by an eminent diplomatist, who had made a 
special study of Germany, in words which are worth quoting : 
*' Such unparalleled successes as those which have attended 
the German arms, and the consequent absolute power 
which the German nation has acquired over Europe, will 
tend especially to modify the German national character, 
and that not necessarily for the better. Arrogance and 
overbearingness are the qualities likely to be developed in 
a Teutonic race under such conditions, not boasting or 
vaingloriousness. I was painfully struck in my visit to 
the camp at Metz in October by the extraordinary difference 
I witnessed in this respect between the language and tenue 
of the officers I met there and those I had observed in the 
days which preceded the invasion of France. Is it love of 
exaggeration to fear that under such circumstances the 
German Empire, based on universal suffrage — i.e, on the 
suffrages of the 800,000 men who have been fighting in 
France — and beginning life under the direction of a Lieu- 
tenant-General who has been present during the whole 
campaign \sc, Bismarck], may have some of the faults of 
militarism attaching to it ? *' ^ It is difficult to believe 
that these words were written by Sir Robert Morier as long 
ago as 1 871. 

The scheme of this chapter does not require a chrono- 
logical survey of German history after Prussia had completed 
the task of substituting a coherent Empire for the dis- 
credited confederation of 1815. But it is necessary to say 
a few words about the genesis and character of the ambitions 
which at the end of forty years of peace have brought 
Germany face to face with a vast hostile coalition. The 

^ Memories and Letters of Sir Robert Morier ^ 1826 to 1876 (London, 191 1), 
vol ii. p. 243. 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 29 

first and inevitable result of the defeat of France was to 
give to Germany a predominant voice in the affairs of 
Europe. As long as Bismarck continued to guide the helm 
of state this predominance was unquestioned. That states- 
man was content to safeguard the position which he had 
won, and, as long as he could prevent any combination 
among possible opponents, his task was comparatively 
simple. The obvious enemy was France, which could 
neither forget nor forgive the loss of the border provinces, 
and the possible allies of France were Russia and Great 
Britain. France single handed was impotent, and the 
primary task of Germany was to secure the isolation of 
France. This was not difficult while France and Britain 
were divided by rival interests in Egypt and in other parts 
of the world, and while France was sundered from Russia 
by long traditions of antagonism and by the instinctive 
antipathy that existed between a highly democratic republic 
and the most autocratic of European monarchies. Such 
danger as might arise seemed to be more than met when, in 
1879, Austria became a subservient ally, and still more 
when, in 1882, Italy, jealous of French advance in northern 
Africa, became detached from its Latin neighbour and was 
rather reluctantly shepherded into the fold of the Triple 
AUiance. 

The Triple Alliance was defended as a security for 
European peace, and so it was as long as its aim, the main- 
tenance of German ascendancy, could be achieved without 
violence. But Europe has never been tolerant for long of 
the domination of any one state. The balance of power is 
not a mere doctrine — it is based upon the instinct of self- 
preservation. The same forces which in the past produced 
the coalitions against Louis XIV and against Napoleon were 
bound sooner or later to lead to a hostile combination 
against William II. The interests of Austria and of Russia 
in the Near East were diametrically opposed, and the sup- 
port of Germany gave to Austria a commanding position 
which Russia could not but resent and resist. The in- 



30 GERMAN CULTURE 

evitable result was a gradual approximation between Russia 
and France which developed into the entente of 1896. 
Matters became more serious still when Britain began to 
emerge from the isolation which had been so marked at the 
time of the Boer War, and set herself to remove or diminish 
the causes of mistrust which had so long kept her apart 
both from France and from Russia. Veteran diplomatists 
shook their heads when the diplomacy of Sir Edward Grey 
put an end to the soreness associated with Egypt, with 
Fashoda, and with the Dreyfus incident, and concluded an 
entente cordiale with France. This led, in spite of diffi- 
culties in Persia and the Far East, to a better understanding 
between Britain and Russia. And so the great powers 
seemed to be definitely grouped into a Triple Alliance on 
the one hand and a Triple Entente on the other. German 
ascendancy, so long established that it had come to be 
regarded as a right, was now definitely challenged. The 
evidence of the new state of things became clear when 
Britain backed France in the Morocco dispute, and when 
Russia hesitated to assent to the absorption by Austria of 
Bosnia and Herzegovina. Germany had become so arro- 
gant that resistance to her will was regarded as an aggressive 
and provocatory action. The Emperor, who combined a 
love of domination with a command of epigrammatic 
phrases, showed his growing uneasiness by talking of his 
*' mailed fist '' and his *' shining armour." The military 
machine which had been so irresistible in 1866 and in 1870 
had lost none of its efficiency in the interval of peace. The 
maintenance of German ascendancy demanded that it 
should be employed to break through the passively hostile 
ring which threatened to strangle Germany. The weaken- 
ing of Russia by the war with Japan postponed an out- 
break and enabled Germany to humiliate Russia in the 
matter of Bosnia and Herzegovina as she had previously 
humiliated France by insisting on the retirement of M. 
Delcasse. By submitting to a series of such actions on the 
part of the Emperor Europe could purchase an unlimited 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 81 

continuance of dishonourable peace. But there is a hmit 
to such endurance, and the Serbian question was to provide 
a final test. If Russia had consented to allow Serbia to be 
degraded as well as punished for its alleged complicity in 
the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand, the Emperor would 
have complacently restored his drawn sword to its sheath. 
But Russia would not bend so far, and Germany struck, 
though by so doing she freed Italy from the defensive 
obligation imposed by membership of the Triple Alliance. 

Although the determination to maintain German hege- 
mony in Europe was the chief cause of the war, it was not 
the only cause, nor would this in itself have sufficed to 
account for the world-wide enmity and alarm which Ger- 
many has aroused. While exulting in their military strength 
and efficiency, Germans have sought for arguments to 
justify their claims to themselves as well as to others. The 
history of the Middle Ages has been ransacked and largely 
rewritten by erudite patriots to prove that the mantle of 
imperial Rome fell upon Germany, and the Holy Roman 
Empire, whose history is a standing witness to the political 
incompetence of Germany, has been refurbished to vindicate 
for the HohenzoUerns the grandiose power and pretensions 
of the Karolings, the Ottos, and the Hohenstaufen. And 
the German reading of history does not content itself with 
a revised interpretation of the past of its own state. The 
German Empire is, after all, only a small part of the terri- 
tories which German valour and German ability have 
gained. Why should a union which has bound together 
Prussia and Bavaria, Saxony and Wiirtemburg, stop at the 
purely arbitrary limits of modem Germany ? Pan-Ger- 
manism holds that the Empire, if it is to be really German, 
must include the whole German race and the lands which 
it has occupied. This is a large demand and would involve 
I a reconstruction of the map of the world. But there are 

i certain small though attractive fragments of the greater 
Germany with which the process of absorption might begin. 
The Netherlands and the greater part of Switzerland were 
I 



32 GERMAN CULTURE 

actually parts of Germany in historical times. Through 
the Netherlands the historic river of Germany runs into 
what is now only in name, but should become in reality, 
the German Ocean. And once the argument for absorption 
is admitted, it will carry one very far. Scandinavia has a 
Teutonic population, and its annexation would give Ger- 
many that entrance to the Baltic which it has been com- 
pelled to evade by the making of the Kiel Canal. Great 
part of northern France was once Prankish, as its name 
implies. And, just on the other side of the Channel lies 
England, the adopted home of Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. 
To the extremxC Pan-German enthusiast the British Empire 
and even the United States should form part of a vast 
confederacj^ whose political centre should be Berlin. 

These colossal aspirations may be dismissed as mere 
dreams, but the dreams of a great nation are not a negligible 
matter, and within practical limits they may guide or 
inspire political action. And in the case of Germany, the 
craving for expansion was strengthened by motives which 
were at once more material and more intellectual than the 
appeal to historical ethnology. In 1879 Germany, which 
in the days of the early Zollverein had leaned towards free 
trade, adopted a policy of strict and scientific protection. 
To a protective state colonies are always more attractive 
than they are to one that discards artificial restrictions of 
trade. And to Germany, expanding at once economically 
and numerically, colonies became an object of passionate 
desire. Without them the German could only emigrate at 
the risk of losing his nationality. Unfortunately desirable 
colonies were not to be had without despoiling some other 
state. This might be denounced as robbery, but it was 
remembered that robbery had been condoned before as a 
sort of missionary enterprise. If other countries had 
possessed the right to extend their dominions as a means 
of spreading civilisation or religion, surely Germany, which 
had come to believe its people of finer moral fibre than 
the degenerate inhabitants of the neighbouring states, could 



GERMANY AND PRUSSIA 33 

not be denied an equal or even a superior right to raise 
and extend the standard of civiUsation. This conception 
of a sort of divine mission has become an obsession among 
a people whose sense of humour has been dulled by extrava- 
gant self-esteem. Emperor, professors, preachers, and poli- 
ticians have combined to sound the praises of German 
KultuTy and to demand that Germany shall have a " place 
in the sun '' for the good of the whole world. 

These ideals have carried German ambitions far beyond 
the bounds of Europe. In fact, Europe has for many years 
ceased to have a restricted life and politics of its own. 
The Germans themselves have coined the word Welt-Politiky 
which most aptly expresses the expansion of political out- 
look. But to enable a state to play a due part in the 
affairs of the world, military strength must be supplemented 
by naval power. As the German navy grew and became 

i the idol both of ruler and of people, the sense of antagonism 
to Britain gained greater and greater intensity. Of what 
avail was it to build and man a great fleet if an island 

1 power with older maritime traditions was strong enough to 
block the outlets from the North Sea ? Hence the British 

'. navy became the German bugbear. It stood between 
Germany and German expansion, and it deprived Germany 
of the power to teach its Kultur to the world. But in spite 
of German claims to ethical and intellectual superiority, it 

I is doubtful whether the world has any deep-seated desire 
to derive the blessings of civilisation from a state which 

1 has given such evidence of superior morality as is afforded 

i by the deliberate assertion of the right of a great power to 
disregard treaty obligations, to trample upon a weaker 
neighbour whom it was pledged to defend, and to wage 

iwar with a cynical brutality which mankind has been 

^struggling for generations to soften. 



II 

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 

By a. D. LINDSAY, M.A. 

Fellow and Tutor, Balliol College, Oxford. 

How are we to describe or estimate the contribution of a 
nation to philosophy ? Great philosophy, like great poetry 
or great science, knows no national boundaries. It is a 
possession of the world. It is the work of genius, and the 
wind of genius blows whither it listeth. Nietzsche de- 
scribes music as the new universal language of Europe. 
Might the same not be said of all the great achievements 
of the human spirit ? Individual philosophers, like indi- 
vidual poets or scientists, are yet human, and may, with 
the rest of us, be caught up in the net of circumstance 
which makes us fight and destroy one another and regulate 
our behaviour to other men as they happen to have been 
bom within this or that national boundary, makes us even 
see that such action is in this present distress our highest 
duty, but they will stiU hold it blasphemy to allow such 
divisions or enmities to enter into the realm of philosophy. 
That were "to do it wrong, being so majestical." We can 
be glad that the Germans have been great enough to go 
on performing Shakespeare, sorry that they are so small- 
minded as to give up their English honorary degrees. We 
would think of their philosophy as we would have them 
think of Shakespeare. 

Nevertheless with " the same spirit, there are diversities 
of gifts," and we may the better appreciate the common 
heritage of European nations if we seek to assess the con- 
tributions made to it by different nations, and especially 
by the nation with whom we are at war. In the history of 

35 



36 GERMAN CULTURE 

modem philosophy which begins in the sixteenth century 
there appear great names of Enghsh, French, Itahan, and 
German philosophers. Philosophy is neither the possession 
of, nor has it been contributed by, any one nation. But 
no one can deny that Germany's contribution has been as 
weighty and important as any other — most critics would 
judge it to be the weightiest and most important. 

There are two ways in which we may try to assess the 
contribution by a nation to philosophy. We may think of 
philosophy as a system of impersonal truths, like the mathe- 
matical sciences, bearing on them no impress of their 
discoverers ; for they have lain hid from the beginning of 
time in the depths of reason, waiting to be discovered. 
The Greeks preserved the names of the discoverers of the 
elementary truths of mathematics, and a Greek in the fourth 
or third century might, in looking over their names, have 
asked w^hether more had been achieved in mathematics 
by Cyrene or Athens or the Pythagoreans of South Italy. 
So we might run over the names of distinction in modern 
philosophy and select those that are German — Leibniz, 
Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Herbart, Schopenhauer, Lotze, among 
them — set them over against Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, 
Berkeley, Hume, Reid, and J. S. Mill, and ask which nation 
had achieved most. Such a procedure would be of little 
value. Philosophy cannot be regarded as a sum of dis- 
coveries, and there are no simple scales in which to weigh 
the importance of different philosophical truths. 

We might, indeed, give up comparisons and try to 
enumerate or expound those philosophical truths which ji 
happen to have been discovered by Germans, but that 
would be to write a history of philosophy with many and 
arbitrary omissions. We should have to ask whether these 
truths just happen to have been discovered by Germans, or 
whether there is something in the German nature which 
explains why they made just the contributions they did. 

Once we begin to consider the question in this way, we 
should soon see that there is much in philosophy which is 



PHILOSOPHY 37 

not impersonal — that philosophy, as an expression of national 
character, is more like poetry than science. EngUsh poetry 
is not the possession of England alone, and it has within itself 
the most abundant diversity of character. Yet it is always 
thoroughly English. English poets, however much they 
differ among themselves, display certain common character- 
istics as compared to French or German or Italian poets. 
This is, of course, as it should be, for poetry is " impassioned 
truth," and as such must bear the impress of personality. 
It is more surprising to find critics agreeing in finding 
English characteristics in all English philosophers — ^finding, 
in fact, that this impress of personality is borne also by 
philosophy. For the character of philosophy is twofold. 
Philosophy is in part concerned with the discovery of cer- 
tain abstract and a priori truths, as impersonal and un- 
national as the truths of mathematics. It is also concerned 
to answer those ultimate questionings about the nature of 
the universe and the destiny of man which arise in all 
men's minds. These questions are not born of the intellect 
: alone, and it is not by the intellect alone that men's answers 
to them are determined. Hence philosophy in this second 
sense is more akin to poetry than to science, and is a more 
intimate expression than is science of human personality. 

Men's answers to these ultimate questions about the 
nature of the universe have taken two forms, distinguished 
! sometimes as critical and dogmatic. Some philosophers 
have held that these questions admit of no answer — that 
' it is in the nature of human reason to ask questions which 
it cannot answer. They have therefore set themselves to 
mark out the limits of our knowledge, to make clear by re- 
flection what we can know and what we cannot. Others 
have refused to believe that limits can be set to reason, 
and have maintained that philosophy can answer these 
ultimate questions, either by pursuing a particular kind 
of reasoning or by reflecting on the whole of human ex- 
perience. The result of such reflection is commonly ex- 
pressed in what is called a metaphysical system. The 



38 GERMAN CULTURE 

choice of criticism or of dogmatism seems to depend upon 
or to be an expression of character. " The EngUsh/' says 
the Danish historian of philosophy, Hoffding, " do not 
care to shoot in the air ; they prefer to hit the mark, even 
should the roar of their artillery be less imposing." It is 
characteristic of English philosophy to be critical and 
cautious, to keep a firm hold on the immediately practical, 
and to fail to see what is beyond the range of the practical 
man. German philosophy, on the other hand, is almost 
always systematic, and, with the notable exception of 
Kant, and, if he is to be counted as a philosopher and not 
as a poet, of Nietzsche, has produced metaphysical systems. 
In the production of metaphysical systems the German 
genius is supreme. For that task requires a union of two 
qualities, both eminently German. Metaphysics is an 
attempt to think things as a whole. It begins, therefore, 
with a survey of the whole field of human knowledge. That 
requires the patient thoroughness and vast industry in 
which the German has never been surpassed. But it is 
not simply a survey or a chronicle of details ; it attempts 
to pierce beyond the superficial diversity and penetrate 
their secret meaning. That requires what is at its best a 
peculiar daring and profundity of thought, or at its worst 
an arbitrary certainty and naive credulity which are also 
very German. The same nation has produced the dry-as- 
dust and the romantic fairy-tale. Metaphysical systems 
often purport to be impartial reason, thinking the world 
as a whole. Actually no one can apprehend the whole of 
things. Actually the metaphysician seeks in experience 
for the intelligible as the poet for beauty, and, like the 
poet, makes what he has found the symbol of or the key 
to the whole that is beyond his immediate apprehension. 
However much, then, he may begin with the apprehension 
of necessary truths, his system is not a discovery, but a 
construction ; it is based on selection and choice ; it cuts 
loose somewhere from the bonds of actual fact or necessary 
truth. That it does so is not a defect. If metaphysics. 



PHILOSOPHY 39 

like poetry, is a venture of the spirit, it is not, any more 
than poetry, an illusion, and metaphysics, in virtue of 
starting from a wide survey of knowledge, has peculiar 
gifts of understanding and illumination. In England we 
mostly like our philosophy or our poetry neat, and English 
philosophers have had more affinities with science than 
Vith poetry. It would be difficult to find less poetic authors 
than Locke, Hume, or Bentham, typical English philo- 
sophers. Hume called poets '' liars by trade," and most 
English philosophers, though more polite, have not been 
much more appreciative of poetry. In Germany, on the 
other hand, there has always been a close relation between 
poetry and philosophy. The first question a German asks 
about a philosopher is, "What is his Weltanschauung?*' — 
his world vision. We could naturally talk of the world 
vision of Shelley or Wordsworth, Browning or George 
Meredith ; there would not seem to be much meaning in 
talking of the " world vision '' of Locke or Hume or Bentham. 
Hence the great English poets have more affinity to German 
than to English philosophers, as is abundantly shown in 
Coleridge's Biographia Literaria ; for in England men go 
to poetry for just that kind of inspiration and illumination 
which in Germany has largely been given by philosophy. 
This is evident throughout the history of German philo- 
sophy, but never more so than in the great period of German 
philosophy and poetry, the end of the eighteenth and the 
beginning of the nineteenth century. This is the age of the 
great philosophical poets, Schiller and Goethe, and of the 
philosophical school which has been called the school of 
romanticism. Only Germany could have produced a 
philosophy which could be called romantic, and that Ger- 
many could do so is a mark alike of the greatness and of 
the defects of her philosophical achievement. 

I 

German philosophy may well be regarded as the most 
characteristic contribution which Germany has made to 



40 GERMAN CULTURE 

the common treasure of the human spirit, and that for two 
reasons. Firstly, as we have said, metaphysical systems 
require for their production a union of qualities which is 
found most strikingly in the Germans. Secondly, the 
Germans express in philosophy their world vision, and the 
difference in men's world visions is largely, though not 
altogether, due to the difference in men's personalities. 
German philosophers at any rate have, more than any 
others, professed to interpret the world in the light of per- 
sonality. The characteristics they display are described 
by Eucken, himself a German—'' a breadth and universality 
which seek to throw away nothing but retain everything, a 
longing for system which forces all diversity into a single 
complex, and thereby vigorously transforms things as they 
are first discovered, an effort to find a standard within the 
soul and from that to understand the whole world ; in all 
great movements and great dangers ; the danger of carrying 
dead ballast and of trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, the 
danger of an overbold speculation which loses sight of 
reality and blunts the immediate impression ; the danger, 
finally, of a formless subjectivity which buries itself in itself ; 
with all this, however, a grand manner which raises thought 
and life to a higher level." ^ 

Two things are of special note in this catalogue — '* a 
longing for system '' and ** an effort to find a standard 
within the soul and from thence to understand the world." 
For it is with the revolt of human freedom against the 
lifeless chains in which the mechanical system which the 
human mind erects in science threatens to bind it that 
German philosophy is always concerned, and German 
philosophy itself shows a curious reflection of the struggle 
between overmastering system and freedom in its own 
history, where the assertion of the freedom of the spirit is 
expressed in systems themselves often rigid and mechanical. 
" The great movement of German philosophy," says the 
late Master of Balliol, " was above all an attempt to find a 

^ Eucken, Lebmsanschauungen der Grossen Denkcvy p. 369, 



PHILOSOPHY 41 

way through the modern principle of subjective freedom — 
the very principle which produced the Reformation of the 
sixteenth and the Revolution of the eighteenth century — 
to a reconstruction of the intellectual and moral order on 
which man's life had been based in the past." *' It is a 
leading characteristic of German thought/' says Hoffding. 
" from the mysticism of the Middle Ages onwards, that it 
asserts the independence, inwardness, and validity of 
spiritual life, and bases its conception of the world on this 
assumption/' Even Hegel, the most conservative of all 
German philosophers, recurs again and again to the freedom 
of the spirit. ''Thus was raised," he says in an address 
on Luther, " the last banner around which the nations 
gather — the banner of the free spirit which, in apprehending 
the truth, still abides with itself — which, indeed, can only 
abide by itself as it apprehends the truth. This is the banner 
under which we serve and which we carry." 

It is a curious paradox that service under such a banner 
has never led to a great comprehension of political liberty, 
that Hegel, for example, in his political writings, abuses 
individualism and deifies the State — even the Prussian State 
before 1848. The explanation of this paradox is that 
freedom essentially implies something from which the spirit 
is free, whatever that something be — the power of sin or 
circumstance, the devil or a mechanical world. No doubt 
it is true, as Geiman philosophers are never tired of point- 
ing out, that merely negative freedom is an abstract con- 
ception. *' I do not ask from what you are free, but for 
what you are free," says Nietzsche. Nevertheless the nega- 
tive side of freedom is essential to it, just as something to 
be acted on is essential to action. The assertion of the 
freedom of the spirit is of inestimable value in face of 
a philosophy which began by conceiving nature as a 
machine, and became so hypnotised by the consideration 
of the wonderful mechanism which it contemplated 
that it forgot that a machine implies a machine-maker 
or user, and that the lifeiessness and rigidity of the 



42 GERMAN CULTURE 

machine is itself an instrument of liberty to the spirit that 
uses it. But such an assertion, if it is not to defeat its own 
ends, must be a demonstration of the compatibility in the 
world of freedom and mechanism, actor and circumstance. 
If the assertion of the absoluteness of the spirit means that 
the spirit swallows up circumstance and spirit becomes the 
whole reality, then nothing is left for the free spirit to do 
and no material for it to work upon. It is important to 
show that nature is not so alien to spirit that it cannot 
be " compelled " by the spirit ; it is fatal to conceive the 
world in such a way that the work of the spirit is thought to 
be already done. Freedom implies that the spirit and the 
world in which it is to act are distinct though not alien. 
It implies that reality is a process of becoming, not some- 
thing whose nature is uniform and fixed. All the great 
German philosophers, with the notable exception of Kant, are 
earnest monists, determined to reveal the world as the ex- 
pression of one principle. The mystic longing for unity and 
absoluteness tends to sweep away distinctions — at least to 
insist on their reconciliation; but distinctions and opposi- 
tions are the breath of freedom and moral life. They 
are, no doubt, distinctions to he overcome, but between 
to be overcome and overcome there .is aU the world of 
difference. 

We may distinguish the great German philosophers by 
their different attitudes to this problem of the reconciha- 
tion or compatibility of the freedom of the human spirit 
with the natinral world as presented by science, and their 
ethical theories depend upon the way in which they solve 
the problem. For German ethical theories are always the 
outcome of their metaphysics, and cannot be considered 
separately. Kant was content to show that the two worlds 
of science and of freedom were compatible. What under- 
lay the compatibility, or what was the real nature of the 
universe in which such compatibility was possible, he de- 
clared to be unknown and unknowable. He was concerned 
to show the vahdity of each of the two principles of neces- 



PHILOSOPHY 43 

sary law and freedom in its own sphere, and to leave it at 
that. Metaphysics, in the sense of an apprehension of the 
real nature of the world as it transcends our experience, he 
argued to be impossible, and for it substituted a criticism 
of pure reason. His successors did not imitate his caution. 
Rather it seemed to them an affront to the absoluteness of 
the human spirit to declare that its knowledge was limited, 
and, instead of thinking of the human spirit as set over 
against the nature in which it lives and acts, sought in it a 
key to the understanding of that nature. Fichte found that 
key in the moral nature of man, Schelling rather in his 
artistic activity, Hegel in man's rational nature. The result 
ia that in Fichte and Schelling natural science really goes by 
the board. Fichte reduces everything to the free Ego, and 
in dismissing the non-spiritual world in which the self is to 
act, he leaves the self no ideal but the achievement of its 
own abstract freedom. Schelling endeavoured to construct 
a philosophy of nature, and it was one which insisted on 
the absolute unity of subject and object, which made all 
distinctions unmeaning, and left no room for moraUty or 
science. Hegel made a notable and illuminating attempt to 
display reason objectified in the world of history, but in 
consequence had little patience with the actual display of 
individuality and all noble rebellious action which is in- 
spired by the knowledge that the world as it is is not rational. 
The human spirit was instructed that it was so absolute 
that all reality was informed by its nature, and that, there- 
fore, discontent with and rebellion against that reality was 
ungrateful and vain. Ethics practically disappears as an 
independent inquiry, and an understanding of the rational 
nature of the state takes its place. 

A philosophy which seems to teach that whatever is 
is right speedily produces a reaction. In Schopenhauer we 
find the hatred of those who say peace when there is no 
peace expressing itself in a passionate conviction of the 
reality of evil and pain. Against this gloomy background 
the free activity of the spirit is but the keenest element in 



44 GERMAN CULTURE 

the tragedy, and the true aim of man becomes the denial 
and abnegation of that fatal will to live, the cruellest 
invention of the blind will that rules the world. As the 
opposition between the individual will and the world is 
again recognised, an independent moral theory is again 
possible, but it is a theory of asceticism and abnegation. 
Lastly Nietzsche, whilst accepting Schopenhauer's account of 
the world and his hatred of an optimistic rationalism, rejects 
his abnegation of the will to Hve. His human spirit is one 
which has stripped itself of all illusions, needs no support 
in the false assurance that the universe is on its side, but 
is content with the mere joy of living dangerously. If, then, 
the earlier romantic philosophers tried to describe reality 
as though there was nothing that needed to be done by 
the free spirit, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche describe it in 
a w^ay that suggests that there is nothing that the world 
calls upon us to do. The former make nature and the 
spirit too akin for action, the latter make them too alien. 
Kant alone, just because he refused to enter into specula- 
tions as to the ultimate nature of the universe, which con- 
tains both nature and man, both asserted the freedom of 
the spirit and left it a world in which to act. ** Two things,*' 
he declared, '' fill the mind with ever new and increasing 
reverence and awe — the starry heaven above me and the 
moral law within." 

II 

If we now try to consider the work of German philo- 
sophers more in detail, it is with no intention of giving an 
account of their work. A short account of great philosophy 
would be as unsatisfactory as a short account of Shake- 
speare. If Fichte's or Schopenhauer's " world-vision " were 
briefly described, it might well seem merely fantastical ; it 
would certainly seem arbitrary. But read Fichte or 
Schopenhauer, and follow their thought, and though you 
may dissent from their conclusions and think many of their 



» 



PHILOSOPHY 45 

inferences unwarranted, you will have nevertheless gained 
illumination and understanding, as you will have thought 
through with them certain aspects of reality, just as the 
man who reads or sees Hamlet with appreciation will have 
acquired more understanding not only of Shakespeare's 
thought, but of human nature, though a summary of the 
play would have left him uninterested and unmoved. I 
propose only to consider how the general characteristics of 
German philosophy which I have noticed, are exempUfied 
in the work of the different philosophers. 

German philosophers may be considered in four divisions 
(the division is chronological, but otherwise rough and 
rather arbitrary; still it will probably prove convenient). 
First Leibniz and Wolff, then Kant ; thirdly the romantic 
school, Fichte, ScheUing, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, and 
lastly, German philosophy since 1850. 

Leibniz was born in Leipzig in 1648, and died in 1718. 
He was distinguished by his prodigious learning and his 
versatility of mind. In the seventeenth century it was still 
possible for one man to master all the science of the time. 
Leibniz was not only acquainted with the great mathe- 
matical achievements of the seventeenth century, he him- 
self added to them in his discovery of the infinitesimal 
calculus. He also took a lively interest in the new dis- 
coveries in biology which the microscope was then making 
possible. He was well fitted, therefore, to make the first 
great attempt at what was to be the high task of German 
philosophy, the reconciliation of the results of modern 
science, and especially of the new physical sciences, with 
the assumptions of morals and religion. He was in his 
nature a great reconciler. Characteristic of him is the re- 
mark that most philosophers are right in what they affirm 
and wrong in what they deny. He even busied himself 
with plans for uniting Catholics and Protestants, and, when 
that failed, for uniting the Lutheran and the Reformed 
Churches. 

His most convincing and lasting contribution to philo- 



46 GERMAN CULTURE 

sophy was his criticism of the distinction between matter 
and motion which had been made by the physicists of the 
time, and his argument, which was to be of growing im- 
portance in the reconcihation of the claims of science and 
rehgion, that the nature of the real must be conceived of as 
force and not as dead matter. For the conception of a 
world of things we should substitute, he taught, a concep- 
tion of a world of centres of force, or, as we now call it, 
energy. This argument was reinforced and made the basis 
of a towering speculative construction through the import- 
ance attached by Leibniz to the individual. He found in 
the individual soul the pattern of reality, and the reality 
of the soul consisted for him in its internal organisation as 
revealed in thought developing out of itself and not in its 
connection with the external world. Hence we get the 
suggestive but fantastic doctrine of monads : that reality 
consists of souls or monads, that nothing else is real, and 
that therefore there is no connection between one monad 
and another. '* The monads have no windows." Hence 
follows the curious denial of the reality of the perception 
of the external world and the doctrine that all knowledge 
is a development from within, and yet is knowledge because 
each monad is representative of the world — a doctrine 
finally culminating in the fantastic miracle of a " pre- 
established harmony.'' God has so arranged that, although 
there are no windows in the soul and no perception of the 
outside world, yet the development of our soul is made to 
harmonise with the development of all other souls, and thus g 
a knowledge of ourselves is at the same time a knowledge 
of the rest of the world — and all this although the very 
existence of a God who should arrange this elaborate har- 
mony is not really consistent with the fundamental doctrine 
of the single reality of the monads. 

Immanuel Kant was bom at Konigsberg in 1724, and 
lived a quiet, retired life in that city, where he was first 
privat-docent and then professor till his death in 1804. His 
first work was on physics. He was at first a disciple of 



PHILOSOPHY 47 

Newton and of Wolff, who had reduced the philosophy of 
Leibniz to a formal and pedantic rationalism. His early 
works are largely directed towards a reconciliation of the 
principles of Newton's physics with the philosophy of Wolff. 
The influence of Hume and Rousseau gradually led him 
to a sense of larger and more ultimate problems, and his 
great work, the Critique of Pure Reason, was conceived in 
1771 and published in 1781, when he was fifty-seven. It 
was followed by a Critique of Practical Reason, dealing 
with moral theory, in 1788, and a Critique of Judgment, 
dealing with aesthetics, in 1790. 

Kant is the greatest of German philosophers, and yet, 
as we have suggested, he is not in all respects typically 
German. He has the German love of system and compre- 
hensiveness. There has seldom been such a systematic 
philosopher. His system was thought out as one, and he 
is never tired of insisting on the necessarily systematic 
nature of the reason and the hopelessness of any procedure 
which is haphazard or consists of unrelated intuitions. 
All that he has to say has its allotted place in the general 
framework of his system, and he often seems to thrust his 
thoughts into an abstract logical scheme which does not 
fit them. At the same time he has none of that leaning 
towards Schwdrmerei which is found in most German 
philosophers. He never seeks to obliterate distinctions ; 
he rather revels in them. There is in all his thought a 
certain stubborn caution which certainly none of his German 
successors have appreciated. They all took for granted that 
his philosophy was impossible as it stood, because it ended 
in a confession of ignorance, in an assertion of the limita- 
tions of our knowledge, and a refusal to choose between 
possible alternative views, and proceeded to " develop '' it 
in various ways, which were not developments, but com- 
plete reversals of his chief doctrine. 

Kant himself tells us that he was " awakened from his 
dogmatic slumber '' by reading Hume, and to the end he 
agreed with Hume's distrust of dogmatic metaphysics. 



48 GERMAN CULTURE 

He saw, however, that Hume's scepticism defeated itself, for 
it claimed to refute the very reasoning on which it was based. 
Further, it made not only metaphysics, but science, im- 
possible, and reduced morality to a mere play of feeling. 
There were two things which Kant, for all his criticism, 
never doubted — the validity of the mathematical sciences 
and the supremacy of the moral law over all vagaries of cir- 
cumstance. These, he held, were the deliverance of reason, 
and, if reason were utterly discredited, as it had been by 
Hume, these would have to go ; yet in the sphere of dog- 
matic metaphysics, reason, Kant held, had discredited 
itself, for the use of reason in that sphere seemed only 
to lead to continual and hopeless contradictions. He sug- 
gested, therefore, that it was essential to discover whether 
there were limits to the use of reason. His work is critical, 
but, though critical, not negative. The result of the 
Critique of Pure Reason is to vindicate the sphere of reason 
in science, in our knowledge of the world as we know it 
in experience, to deny any power of knowledge in matters 
that transcend experience, such as the being of God and the 
nature of the soul, and to distinguish between the spheres of 
science and of moral action in such a way as to show the 
compatibility of the principle of necessary connection which 
is the basis of science and the principle of freedom which 
is the basis of morality. He thus compensates reason for 
the denial of its power of knowing the supersensible by 
asserting its supremacy in matters of practice. 

To attempt even an outline of Kant's argument would 
be impossible in an article such as this. It is sufficient for 
our purpose to note that he vindicates the use of reason in 
science by making a distinction between the form and the 
matter of knowledge. He puts his point very clearly in 
one passage when he says that we can only understand 
nature if we ask her to answer questions which we ourselves 
have framed. The form of our questions is dictated by the 
nature of reason within us. It comes from us, and not 
from things, and the form of the questions naturally dictates 



PHILOSOPHY 49 

the form of the answer. We can only know things in so 
far as they supply answers that will fit into the form of our 
questions. Science consists of the answers which we get 
from our interrogation of nature ; the form of science, that 
is all the a priori part of science, comes not from nature, 
but from us. The matter, however, comes from nature, 
not from us, and the matter cannot be anticipated, but only 
known by empirical observation, and is given, in Kant's 
terminology, not by the understanding but in perception. 
All knowledge involves these two elements, form and matter, 
or the operation of those two faculties, understanding and 
perception. Reason, therefore, can give knowledge only in 
regard to what is given in perception. When it attempts to 
come by a priori methods to conclusions as to the nature 
of what transcends experience, there can only be the form, 
and not the matter, and form without matter is meaning- 
less. The principle of necessary connection is a principle 
used by the understanding in co-ordinating and coming to 
know the diverse matter presented to the senses in percep- 
tion. Without it our experience would be but a diaos of 
unconnected data. It is, therefore, in Kant's words, a 
principle of the possibility of experience. Yet it is only 
used to connect what we have experienced in separate 
discrete moments. Let us suppose, for example, that 
change is a continuous process. Its complete continuity 
cannot be apprehended by us. We can only observe diffe- 
rent stages at different moments. If we are to understand 
our experience at all, we must learn to connect rightly a 
stage seen at this moment with a stage that is in the past. 
In doing that, in finding out whether A rather than B is 
the cause of C, we must be governed by our perception of 
A, B, and C. The details of any causal law come from 
experience. But the real nature of the connection between 
two stages that we see is not known, only that this stage 
is to be connected with that rather than with a third, and 
the general principle of necessary connection is not got by 
experience, but is prescribed by us to nature in the form of 

D 



50 GERMAN CULTURE 

the question by which we interrogate it. The vahdity of 
the principle of causation in science does not warrant us in 
asserting that things really are determined, and that there 
is no such thing as freedom. We know nothing as to the 
real connection of things in themselves. If, therefore, we 
have any other reason for believing in freedom, science at 
least has nothing to say against it. When we consider 
moral action and moral judgment, we find that the notion 
of moral obhgation implies that there is a way in which 
we ought to act which is quite independent of how we may 
in fact act, and we cannot say that we have done wrong 
without implying that we might, if we had so willed it, 
have done right. For Kant the conception of freedom or 
autonomy, as we call it, is the fundamental assumption of 
morality, and its vahdity is quite compatible with the 
vahdity of the principle of necessary connection in the 
sphere of science. No doubt there must be something in 
the real nature of things in virtue of which we both can 
connect what we see of things by the principle of causation 
and can be ourselves free in action. What that is, however, 
we do not know, and, according to Kant, cannot know, 
and there is no use in trying to find it out. Morality im- 
plies the freedom of the will, but we cannot understand that 
freedom, for understanding means connecting, and is con- 
cerned with what we see, and freedom is the activity of the 
real self, which is supersensible. In moral action, then, the 
real nature of man, which, to the mere observer, is hidden 
behind the way he looks and his outward action, is mani- 
fested though it cannot be understood. The moral law, 
being thus that in which man is free from the chain of out- 
ward circumstance, is not derived from facts, and is inde- 
pendent of what a man's inclinations or circumstancesj 

may be. c r a 

Kant does not, however, base his argument for freedom 
on the personal conviction that each man may have in 
himself that he is free. If that were done, every strong 
personal co..viction would claim to be the utterance o. 



PHILOSOPHY 51 

reason, and a man's conviction that he was right would 
need no further demonstration. Morahty for Kant always 
means mutual obligation, and it is displayed not in our 
personal feelings or convictions, but in our relations with 
our fellows. Moral judgments imply that we judge others 
as we would have them judge ourselves, that we expect no 
more from others than we would have them expect from us, 
that we regard ourselves as being responsible to them as 
they are responsible to us. This is the essentially moral 
attitude, and the principles of action derived from it must 
be supreme over all mere inclination or pressure of circum- 
stances. If, Kant says, we are, as anthropologists, trying 
to understand a man's actions, we may explain them by 
pointing to the force of habits or of inherited character or 
of circumstance. As moralists, in judging others as we 
would ourselves, we must recognise that such considerations 
are not to the point. They are irrelevant to the Tightness 
or wrongness of action. 

The supreme principle of morals is called by Kant the 
categorical imperative. It is distinguished from hypo- 
thetical imperatives, such as *' If you want to be well or 
happy or successful, do so and so." The moral imperative 
is preceded by no ** if." It is based on the moral relation of 
man with his fellows and is thus formulated by Kant : 
" Always act so that you can will that the maxim of your 
action should be a universal law." 

Kant's moral theory is often condemned as abstract 

and impossible. It is true that he sometimes seems to 

think that we can discover what we ought to do on any 

occasion by merely asking whether it is in accordance with 

the categorical imperative. The fact is that there is no a 

'priori way of discovering what we ought to do, no rule which 

will dispense us from the responsibihty of individual moral 

f judgment. The moral will has got to will something, it has 

Uo recognise that from the moral point of view some actions 

aare good and others bad. Nevertheless Kant has correctly 

described the fundamental basis from which all moral 



52 GERMAN CULTURE 

judgments start, the mutual relation of moral beings. Man 
is to regard himself as a member of a kingdom of ends ; he is 
to " treat humanity in his own person and in that of others 
as an end, never merely as a means/' That principle will 
not of itself always tell us what we ought to do, but it is 
a sure negative test. If we claim for ourselves rights which 
we are not prepared to allow to others, if we refuse duties 
which we exact from others, we are flouting the elementary 
principles of morality. 

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant offers a refutation 
of all theoretical proofs of the existence of God. Specu- 
lative theology is an attempt to apply the principles of 
the understanding, which have meaning only in reference 
to experience, to that which transcends experience. The 
fundamental principles of speculative theology, the freedom 
of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence 
of God, can neither be proved nor disproved by the under- 
standing. In morality, however, we are concerned with 
something which transcends and is independent of experi- 
ence, and morahty, therefore, may give us a basis for theo- 
logy, though knowledge cannot. Morality implies, as we 
have seen, that we are free. It also implies that the dif- 
ference between right and wrong extends beyond our human 
existence ; it imphes that the difference between right and 
wrong has a more than human significance — it implies 
the existence of a moral God. The principles which specu- 
lative theology sought to prove are, according to Kant, 
postulates of moral action. We must act as though the 
will were free, the soul immortal, and as though God existed. 
Rehgion, then, depends not on the intellect, but on the 
will. Speculative theology is impossible, but practical 
theology is not. The practical reason is for Kant supreme ■ 
over the theoretical. He ''limited reason to make room 
for faith," and faith for Kant did not mean believing 
things on insufficient evidence, but the confidence displayed, 

in action. 

The chief difficulty in Kant's philosophy is the sharp ^ 



i 



PHILOSOPHY 53 

distinction he made between the two worlds of knowledge 
and of action, or of appearances and of things in themselves. 
Can we believe that we have no knowledge of reality, or 
that we are concerned only with appearances ? All that 
Kant has shown is that there can be no a priori knowledge 
of reality, and that we can only know things from what we 
see of them. That justifies a distinction between a thing 
as it is and what we know of it, for the determinations of 
any one thing are infinite, and our knowledge must always 
be finite. Nevertheless we can still say that the more we 
know, the more we are coming to know of the real. If 
Kant's argument is sound as against a priori knowledge of 
reality, it is surely not sound as against empirical know- 
ledge. If we cannot know God by a priori reasoning, we 
can surely maintain that we can come to know Him as He 
is revealed in experience and history. 

Kant did not consider this possibility, mainly because 
he was examining only a priori knowledge ; and he would 
still have maintained that theology was concerned with 
what transcended experience, and could, therefore, not be 
known empirically. If we seek to draw conclusions as to 
the nature of the universe from what we know of parts of 
it, we are not knowing but forming hypotheses which we 
cannot verify. With such procedure he was not concerned. 
There is, however, a further difficulty — that, instead of 
saying that we only know things as they appear, and that 
they are more than they appear — a justifiable position — 
Kant often, or indeed usually, says that we know appear- 
ances as though an appearance were a mental entity, an 
impression produced on our mind by a thing. It was open, 
therefore, for a critic who accepted the position that we 
only knew appearances — i.e. something that is mental — to 
question the assumption of things in themselves which 
produced them. This was actually the line of develop- 
ment taken by German philosophy. Kant had made a 
distinction between what the mind contributed to know- 
ledge and the data which it received. His critics pointed 



54 GERMAN CULTURE 

out that the data were only sensations, and that these were as 
much mental as anything else ; that the distinction between 
what is given and what is produced by the mind was a 
distinction within the mind. The object, then, was not 
to be thought of as the non-mental as opposed to the mind, 
but as that which the mind must think as opposed to what 
it may or may not think — that in itself over which it has 
no control as opposed to that over which it has control. 

Fichte (1782-1814) is the first representative of this line 
of thought. He protested against the absurdity of the 
thing in itself as a gratuitous assumption, which was the 
great flaw in Kant's philosophy, and maintained that both 
the subject and object in knowledge were to be thought of 
as mental or spiritual, that the distinction of subject and 
object was a distinction between the individual ego and 
what limited it. With this position he combined Kant's 
doctrine of the supremacy of the practical reason, and taught 
that the essence of the self lay in acting and willing — in 
overcoming the limitations with which it is confronted in 
knowledge. The self finds itself confronted with what 
seems to be other than self, limiting and restraining its 
activities. In action this opposition is overcome and com- 
plete reality manifested. Therefore we must conceive of 
reality as a self that is active, differing only from ourselves 
in not being finite and limited, or in having overcome the 
limits by which we are hampered — being, in short, a tra- 
scendental self or ego. Our duty is to get rid of all limita- 
tions, all limiting desires or hampering of circumstance 
which keep us finite, and develop the full freedom of the 
spirit which is complete reality. Fichte's philosophy would 
seem a monument of egoism but for his insistence on the 
distinction between the empirical self and the transcendental. 
All that we ordinarily call the world as opposed to our- 
selves he would not call an illusion. It is real enough as 
that which limits or is other than our actual empirical 
selves. Illusion only arises if we think that its ultimate 
nature is alien to us, if we do not realise that any concep- 



PHILOSOPHY 55 

tion of it as merely a limit is abstract and unmeaning, that 
it is a transcendental self. Fichte is, in fact, interpreting 
all reality in the light of what we find in ourselves. We are 
to begin by distinguishing between appearance and reality 
within us, and to find the real in our moral will, and judge 
everything else by that standard. However much Fichte 
may have thought he was following Kant, his whole method 
and spirit of philosophising differs from Kant's as completely 
as could well be imagined. He finds in moral action, as 
he conceived it, something completely intelligible and satis- 
fying, and says that reality is therefore of that nature — a 
method of procedure which contradicts Kant's whole 
teaching. Further, it is to be noted that, although he 
follows Kant in making the moral nature of man supreme, 
his system really undermines morality ; for the self, inter- 
acting not with other selves, but with the transcendental 
self, has little concern for that respect for mutual rights 
and duties which for Kant was the foundation of the moral 
law. Morality becomes the assertion of the will that it 
will be free — an empty and dangerous abstraction. 

The romantic tendency which is apparent in Fichte 
became more pronounced in SchelHng (1775-1854). He 
concerned himself with the implications of moral conflict, 
and sought to expound nature as the revelation of the 
spirit. Art, which is inspired with the consciousness of 
harmony between the mind and nature, was for him the 
highest form of knowledge, and he attempted to evolve a 
philosophy of nature which drew its material from art, and 
not from science. The result was not of great value. Art 
cannot be called upon to do the work of science, and Schel- 
ling's philosophy of nature consists of somewhat vague 
generalities in which all distinctions are obliterated — '' the 
night in which all cows are black,'' as Hegel called it. 

Hegel (1770-1831) is the greatest of the romantic philo- 
sophers. He recognised from the first the dangers of the 
subjectivism of Fichte and the indiscriminate vagueness of 
Schelling, and set himself to give an account of reality 



56 GERMAN CULTURE 

which would do justice to the richness and diversity of 
concrete fact and yet assert the essential unity of the world. 
For him the real is the rational and the rational is the real. 
His test of rationality is concreteness, and he adds that the 
concrete is only reached through abstractions which are 
overcome. Thought is always abstract to begin with, but 
each abstraction refutes itself and leads to its opposite. If, 
like Fichte, we seek all reality in ourselves, we must so 
conceive the self that it becomes the world, and there is no 
room for the self as distinguished from the world. The 
subject is only known as over against the object, and the 
object as over against the subject ; each taken in itself is 
abstract, taken both together and yet distinguished they 
are concrete, and real. The intelligible is not, then, to be 
discovered by our looking into ourselves alone and using 
what we find there as a key to what is outside, but by our 
looking also into the world as we know it and find it to 
be rational. Not abstract reasoning, but study of the world, 
will accomplish the task of philosophy. What we see of 
the world at any one moment, or by the various methods 
of science and intuition, is abstract and imperfect. We 
know it as real in so far as we see it to be rational, and 
philosophy's business is to display the rationality of the 
real as it is presented to us in science and in history. 

Hegel was a man of immense knowledge and patience. 
He conceived the task of philosophy to be the thinking to- 
gether, the seeing in their mutual relation, all the various 
facts presented in isolation by the separate science. Science, 
he held, is necessarily abstract, because it concerns itself 
with one aspect of reality at a time, and studies only that. 
Yet these different aspects do not exist in abstraction, 
they are all part of one concrete whole, and if we want to 
know things as they really are we must strive to see them 
in their relation to one another and to the whole. For 
this task, the task of justifying history and fact to reason, 
Hegel was eminently fitted, and in the success with which 
he achieved it lies the great and abiding value of his work. 



PHILOSOPHY 57 

He thought through an immense mass of facts which to 
most men are only half understood because they are only 
seen in isolation. No one can read a book like the lectures 
on Esthetic or those on the Philosophy of History without 
feeling the illumination of Hegel's mind. When he is deal- 
ing with facts and exhibiting to us their rationality and 
showing us how seeming oppositions can be overcome, we 
can only appreciate his wisdom ; only we must insist that 
if the task of philosophy is to be so conceived, facts must be 
there for philosophy to understand. There are times when 
Hegel himself insists on this. '' Philosophy, as the thought 
of the world, *' he says in a famous passage, " does not 
appear until reality has completed its formative process 
and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the 
teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of 
reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, 
apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it 
into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its 
grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means 
of grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only known. The owl 
of Minerva wings its flight only when the shades of night 
are gathering,'' and again, " To apprehend what is is the 
task of philosophy, because what is is reason. As for the 
individual, everyone is a son of his time : so philosophy 
also is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as 
foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its 
present world, as that an individual could leap out of his 
time or jump over Rhodes. If a theory transgresses its 
time, and builds up a world as it ought to be, it has an 
existence merely in the unstable element of opinion, which 
gives room to every wandering fancy." ^ 

Philosophy in this view should surely be represented as 
something essentially imperfect and as in a state of develop- 
ment, for all philosophers are sons of their time, and the 
world in which they live is still changing, and they are 
limited in their knowledge even of the world of their own 

^ Hegel, Philosophy of Eighty Preface. 



68 GERMAN CULTURE 

time. How are we to know when the world has " come 
to maturity " ? Hegel unfortunately sometimes writes as 
though his philosophy were final, as though in the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century the world were complete 
and had only to be known. His insistence that we could 
know nothing which was not real, produced the conviction 
that there was nothing real which we could not know, and 
that the empirical limits of the human mind and its definite 
place in the time series could somehow be transcended in 
philosophy. The result is that when facts will not fit into 
his logical scheme, he often seems to say, " So much the 
worse for the facts,'' that he tends to confuse the process of 
knowledge by which we come to know a reality which has 
been true all the time with the process of change in things, 
and so to substitute for the concrete individual facts a 
scheme of abstract categories. For all Hegel's realism there 
was in him much of that German love of the transcendent, 
that impatience with the limitations of time and place that 
thinks the understanding of the end to be attained the 
same as the attaining of it, and the ideal more real than 
the actual. Hegel is not to be tempted away from the 
actual by the ideal, but he sometimes insists, in spite of 
the most manifest facts, that the actual is itself already ideal. 

In no region was this transcendental tendency of Hegel's 
more unfortunate than in ethics. For, as we have said, 
a morality which is not founded on opposition, on the con- 
trast between what is and what ought to be, between the 
actual and the ideal, is worse than useless. Hegel in his 
revolt against abstract ideals refused to devote a separate 
inquiry to moral theory, and so put what he has to say 
about ethics in his Philosophy of Right, his analysis of the 
state. For only in society and under the government by 
the state is the concrete moral life possible. In the state 
morality has got itself made actual and realised. The state 
therefore is " God walking upon earth." 

Hegel did good service by insisting on the moral nature 
of the state, but his dislike of any ideal which was not con- 



PHILOSOPHY 59 

Crete made him sometimes preach only a poKtical morality. 
But the morality that is incorporated in political institu- 
tions can never represent more than the average morality 
of the citizens of the state. That state will be in a parlous 
plight some at least of whose citizens have not higher ideals 
than the law recognises, who are not in revolt against the 
state as it is for love of the state as it ought to be. The 
political doctrines of natural right may suffer from being 
abstract, but they are of inestimable service in laying down 
a standard by which the state itself is to be judged. Hegers 
idealisation of the actual made him in practice a defender 
of the Prussian state and an opponent of the German 
Liberalism which was seeking to reform it. The doctrine 
of the free spirit was perverted into that vile defence of 
tyranny which tries to persuade the man who is struggling 
against oppression that he is free already. ''That roar, 
' What seek you ? ' is of tyrants in all days.*' There is 
no great difference between the state in Hegel's accounts of 
it and that modern German apotheosis of the state which 
is prepared in the name of the state to destroy all that 
makes the state worth having. 

The philosophy of Hegel was supreme in all German 
universities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its 
combination of realism and transcendentalism, however, 
led to a division among his followers, some of whom en- 
deavoured to make his '* world vision " less pantheistic and 
more theological, while others, notably Marx, emphasized 
the realistic side of his teaching, and prepared the way for 
that materialism which was fostered by the great revival 
of science in the nineteenth century. A more immediate 
reaction, however, against his whole philosophy appears 
in Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is a Romantic 
philosopher, for he finds in his own experience the key to 
the universe. He is in complete revolt against the assump- 
tion which had dominated all his predecessors, that of the 
rationality of the universe. That assumption, he thought, 
had made men deny the most obvious facts of pain and evil. 



60 GERMAN CULTURE 

Himself intensely conscious of suffering and discord in him- 
self, and keenly sympathetic with sufferings in others, he 
felt the existence of pain and evil the most evident of facts. 
If the assumption that the universe was rational meant 
that that fact was explained away, that only showed the 
futility of the assumption. 

Schopenhauer was, therefore, an anti - intellectualist. 
He went back to Kant and accepted Kant's doctrine of 
the limits of human reason. The understanding he taught 
is concerned only with ideas, and tells us nothing of the 
nature of the world. But he differed from Kant in holding 
that we can know the nature of the world. Its reality is 
will. It is revealed in the striving and restlessness within 
us and in art, especially in music, which is concerned not 
with ideas but with will. Since Schopenhauer distinguishes 
sharply between will and intellect, his will is only a striving, 
irrational and blind. We are all the products of this blind 
will which is the world. We live not because we know that 
the life is good, but because the will impels us. When we 
understand the truth, and see that the will is evil, we shall 
learn to deny it. Quiescence, then, is the true end of life, 
and sympathy and asceticism the principles of virtue. 
Actions are good in so far as they are selfless, in so far as 
they deny that restless will to live which is implanted in 
us for our misery. 

Schopenhauer's philosophy is perhaps more subjective 
than any other, a vivid and powerful expression of his own 
temperament in the guise of an account of reality. It is 
in its poetic qualities that its value consists, in its expression 
of one side of life which philosophy had tended to ignore, 
and in its noble refusal to deny facts because they are 
disagreeable. 

Since Schopenhauer there have been no names in Ger- 
man philosophy fit to rank with the great names of the 
end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth 
century. The rapid growth of science led to a reaction 
against the Romantic school which expressed itself in 



PHILOSOPHY 61 

materialism. Dissatisfaction with Hegel has led to a re- 
vival of Kantian philosophy and to renewed attempts to 
reconcile in one '' world vision " the mechanical assump- 
tions of science and the claims of religion and ethics. As a 
whole, however, there has been in German philosophy since 
1850 great industry and knowledge but little vision. Much 
serious and valuable work has been done in the history of 
philosophy, and more especially in experimental psychology. 
There is no one among recent German philosophers to 
compare in creative thought and illumination with Bergson, 
and the most interesting and fruitful development of HegeFs 
philosophy does not come from Germany, but from Italy, 
in the work of Croce and Gentile. 

Nietzsche perhaps deserves some separate notice. He 
is very different from most German philosophers, for he 
has no system, and indeed abhorred systems. It is 
doubtful whether he ought to be considered as a philosopher 
at all ; for a philosopher surely seeks truth by thinking, and 
at any rate tries to be consistent. Nietzsche finds truth 
in isolated intuition, and cares nothing for consistency. 
He followed in his writing not German but French models, 
and most of his works are written in short isolated 
paragraphs, often extremely enlightening and suggestive, 
but not forming or being meant to form a coherent whole. 
His greatest work, Thus Spake Zoroaster, is manifestly 
poetry, and poetry of a verj^ high order. When he tries 
to expound his philosophy as a thesis, as in The Genealogy 
of Morals, what he has to say is of very little value. 

Nevertheless he has, though not a system, a '' world 
vision," he is in the Romantic tradition, and he has a teach- 
ing about morality which is interesting and has had a great 
influence. 

Nietzsche is most easily understood as an inverted 
Schopenhauer. He accepted Schopenhauer's account of 
the world as evil and alien to man, accepted also his unfor- 
tunate identification of Christianity with asceticism, but 
revolted against his pessimism and his denial of the will 



62 GERMAN CULTURE 

to live. The behaviour which Schopenhauer praises he 
condemns. Asceticism and Christianity are founded on the 
denial of life. Courage and daring, then, are the noblest 
of virtues. Man's greatness consists not in obeying or in 
acquiescence, but in creation — and the greatest creation is 
the creation of moral values. Life is a continual revaluing 
of values, a new creating of values by the great man, who 
is not supported by a moral universe or by the morality 
of his fellows. For Nietzsche's morality is essentially 
aristocratic ; democracy he hates. Like his Romantic pre- 
decessors (for he is essentially a Romantic) he interpreted 
the world by himself. Truth is got by daring, and the true 
view of the world is that which it takes most daring to 
believe. Nietzsche's views have been much perverted. 
They have been taken to support all these tendencies in 
modern German thought which he most hated. Yet it is 
the fault of his teaching that it lends itself so easily to per- 
version. He himself attacked a perversion of Christianity. 
Perverted Christianity is nothing to perverted Nietzschian- 
ism ; for if his teaching is made into a doctrine, and the 
poetry taken out of it, it can be made to contain little more 
than that silly misunderstanding of Darwinism which has 
been invoked to defend violence and greed and to condemn 
co-operation and brotherliness. The value of his work lies 
not in the doctrines which it inculcates — these are neither 
consistent nor profound — but in its fine exploration of the 
possibilities of courage. We might apply to him, as to all 
German philosophers, words which are used by Hoffding 
of Schopenhauer : *' Every important individuality is a 
point of view for the human race from which men catch 
sight of possibilities and aspects of existence which would 
otherwise have escaped them." 

Nietzsche broke with the great tradition of German 
philosophy. The long struggle between the attempt to be 
all-comprehensive, to form a system which would take in 
all the facts and yet do justice to the freedom of the spirit, 
has by his time broken down. The amassers of facts have 



PHILOSOPHY 63 

little vision, and the seer of visions no foundation for his 
vision but his own fiery spirit. The lifelessness of much 
modern German learning, and the shallowness and incon- 
sistency of much of Nietzsche's thought, for all his extra- 
ordinary flashes of insight, makes us realise how great a 
thing had been the combination of system and romanticism 
in earlier German philosophy. We in this country are not 
in much danger of suffering from the defects of German 
philosophy. Our spirit revolts against them too easily. 
The saving grace of humour and the distaste for the im- 
practical will keep us from following their guidance blindly. 
We are perhaps in more danger of being blind to their great 
qualities, their thoroughness and their daring of thought, 
which have made German philosophy a powerful instrument 
of inspiration and illumination. 



Ill 

WHAT SCIENCE OWES TO GERMAN 
INVESTIGATORS 

By Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., LL.D. 

Professor of Natural History, University of Aberdeen 

GENERAL 

The aim of this chapter is to give some indication of the 
magnitude of the contributions which German investigators 
have made to Science (in the conventional sense), especially 
during the last hundred years. We have sought to illustrate 
the state of the case mainly as regards Biology, Physics, 
and Chemistry.! Of the abstract science of Mathematics, it 
would require genius to speak profitably in a sketch of this 
sort, so we have given a list of about half a hundred of the 
great mathematicians, classified according to nationality. 
As to the Applied Sciences (such as Medicine, Forestry, 
Engineering, and Agriculture) we have not been able to 
do more than give a few illustrations. Perhaps it will tend 
to clearness if we borrow from another inquiry a map of 
the sciences, and this is the more appropriate since it is 
characteristic of the German mind to be orderly, to have 
things classified and systematised. This feature may be 
in part a traditional inheritance from the Encyclopaedists ; 
it may also indicate a particular kind of intellectual tem- 
perament, eager to map out everything methodically (which 

^ Our indebtedness to Merz^s History of European Thought in the Nineteenth 
Century (4 vols., 1 896-1 9 14) is gratefully acknowledged. We have also utilised 
two of our previous studies — The Science ^^^^^(Blackie, 1899), ^ind The Progress 
of Science (Chambers, 1902). 

66 B 



GERMAN CULTURE 



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SCIENCE 67 

may or may not mean lucidly) ; it may also express, what 
many busy men recognise, that orderliness is a condition 
of efficiency. It is probable, in any case, that the Germans 
in their normal condition have the most orderly minds in 
Europe. In this respect Herbert Spencer may be re- 
garded as thoroughly German, though very divergent in 
other ways, for instance in his ignoring of the literature 
of the subject he discussed. It may be regrettable, but it 
seems more or less true, that there is not much appetite in 
Britain for methodical systematisation. 

Many of us have been accustomed in the past to think 
gratefully and to speak enthusiastically of the contributions 
which have been made to science by German investigators, 
and it is possible that the gratitude and the enthusiasm 
have been overdone. The aim of this chapter is to re- 
consider the facts of the case in a scientific mood. In so 
doing we have sought to avoid vague generalisations, 
especially of depreciation (too many of which are in cur- 
rency), and to keep close to particular investigators and 
their achievements. We have thrown our study into his- 
itorical form, so that the contributions made by various 
[nationalities may be in a general way compared. We 
emphasize the words " in a general way," for it does not 
^5eem to us at all feasible to weigh the merits of individual 
^investigators against one another. 
\ Let us make a provisional comparison : — 

\ Newton Leibniz. 

\ Harvey A. von Humboldt. 

Dalton Bunsen. 

Darwin . . . . . Kepler, 

Graham Liebig. 

Faraday Clausius. 

Clerk Maxwell , . . Boltzmann. 

Kelvin Helmholtz. 

Spencer ..... Lotze. 

Joule Mayer. 

Huxley Haeckel. 

Hooker Sachs. 

Lankester Johannes Mijller. 



68 



GERMAN CULTURE 



Green . 

JENNER . 

Almroth Wright 

J. J. Thomson 

Ross 

Davy 

F. M. Balfour 

Foster . 

Lister . 

Galton . 

William Smith 

GOODSIR 

Stokes . 
Lloyd Morgan 
Fitzgerald . 
Lodge . 
Burdon-Sanderson 



Gauss. 

Behring. 

Ehrlich. 

Kirchhoff. 

Koch. 

Weber. 

Roux. 

LUDWIG. 
ViRCHOW. 

Weismann. 

SUESS. 

Gegenbaur. 

Cantor. 

Wundt. 

Hertz. 

Ohm. 

Du Bois-Reymond. 



Such parallel lists are interesting and even instructive, 
but too much must not be made of them. There is no 
agreement as to which men should be weighed against one 
another, as to whether we should consider the investigator's 
mental ability or his influence on the thought of the age, 
as to the values of the various discoveries, and so on. We 
cannot attain to this kind of comparative anthropometry. 
Our question here is less ambitious and probably more 
useful : To what discoveries and to what developments of ' 
ideas have German investigators contributed in such a way 
that their influence on science has been formative and 
lasting? We shall see that the answer must be, "To a 
great many.'' 

We have perhaps overloaded our survey with names and 
references, but this has been done in the hope of touching 
many threads of recollection in our readers' minds, and 
of lessening the risk of error in the general conclusion. We 
may be wrong in many an indiv dual case, for instance, in 
our estimate of the part played by Goethe in the develop- 
ment of morphology, or of the importance of Weismann in 
relation to the study of heredity, but the probable error 
diminishes with the number of cases considered— unless, in- 



SCIENCE 69 

deed, there is some fatal bias throughout, of which we are, 
of course, unconscious. 

We must admit our failure to discriminate between race 
and nationality, and it is with nationality that we have 
dealt. As the difficulty applies to Britain, France, Russia, 
America, and so on, as well as to Germany, it is possible 
that the justness of the comparative impression may not be 
greatly affected. Perhaps the greatest difficulty is in regard 
to the Jewish element in the various nations, for the Jews 
have been extraordinarily inventive and independent, espe- 
cially in certain departments, such as physiology and path- 
ology. As we have not been able to discriminate the 
Jewish strain, we have probably given the various nation- 
alities considerably more than they deserve. 

Another difficulty applies especially to recent investiga- 
tions, on which Time has not pronounced a verdict : the 
most momentous discoveries may be lying within our ken, like 
dry seeds whose promise and potency not even the wisest can 

( discern. Who in 1866 would have said that one of the greatest 
of biological discoveries had been recently made and published 

' in the Moravian town of Briinn ? And it is curious that in 
the second volume of his History of Civilisation, published 

I two years after J^he Origin of Species, Buckle lamented the 

j absence in science of any recent generalisation of much 
magnitude ! 

Needless to say, we hold no pro-Teuton brief, but it 

j: seems to us that injustice has been done by some of the 
recent depreciations of what Science owes to German in- 

;■ vestigators. It is to be feared that old scientific friendships 
will never be renewed, but for the sake of generations to 
come, the ideal of a world-wide republic of science must not 
! be relinquished. 

Deplore as we may what Germany has done in bringing 
about this war and in the course of waging it, disap- 
, pointed as we may be at the tragedy of what seems to us 
1 to be a terrible reversion in civilisation, we should not 

.1 forget what some of Germany's sons have done for the 



70 GERMAN CULTURE 

illumination of the world. Nor should we forget that we 
are not ourselves the finest Parian, or the fact that between 
the individual and the state a great gulf — difficult to 
navigate — is fixed. 

For the sake of future international relations, when 
civilisation — after a terrible parenthesis illumined by valour 
— will begin, we hope, once more to develop in the direction 
of positive peace, and for the sake of our own self-respect 
as truth-lovers, we must withstand the temptation to 
belittle what has proved itself great — the work done by 
German investigators. If our characteristically sane sense 
of hiunour were not being (necessarily) blunted by sorrow, 
anxiety, and indignation, we should perceive the absurdity 
of depreciating the scientific greatness of the country of 
Behring, Boltzmann, Bunsen, Cantor, Clausius, Dedekind, 
Du Bois-Reymond, Ehrlich, Fischer, Frege, Gauss, Gegen- 
baur, Goethe, Haeckel, Helmholtz, Hering, Herschel, Hertz, 
Hofmann, Hofmeister, Humboldt, Keppler, Kirchhoff, 
Koch, Kopp, Leibniz, Liebig, Lotze, Ludwig, Mayer, Meyer, 
Johannes Miiller, Ohm, Ostwald, Penck, Richthofen, Rie- 
mann, Ritter, Rosenbusch, Roux, Sachs, Suess, Virchow, 
the Webers, Weismann, Wislicenus, Wolff, Wundt, Zirkel, 
Zittel. 

Another preliminary note seems necessary, that there 
are several distinct kinds of scientific discoverer, (i) There 
is the discoverer who finds out and justifies new methods, 
as Kirchhoff and Bunsen did in establishing spectroscopy, 
as Simpson with the use of chloroform as an anaesthetic, 
as Jenner did with vaccination. (2) There is the discoverer 
who makes new contacts between different departments of 
science, as Wundt did in bringing physiology and psychology 
together, as Ostwald has done in bringing physics and 
chemistry together, as Galton and Pearson have done 
with biometry. (3) There is the discoverer of some new 
instrument or practical device, such as the telescope and 
the compound microscope, both of which are probably to 
the credit of Galilei, such as the heart-beat measurer of 



SCIENCE 71 

Ludwig or the laryngoscope of Czermak. (4) There is the 
discoverer who gives practical point and application to a 
theoretical generahsation already estabUshed, as Hertz did 
in connection with wireless telegraphy, as Lister did in 
proving the value of antiseptics. (5) There is the dis- 
coverer who completes a synthesis towards which many 
lines of investigation had been leading, as Schwann and 
Schleiden did in formulating the cell- theory, as Joule and 
Helmholtz did in stating the law of the conservation of 
energy, as Darwin did in making the evolution-idea current 
intellectual coin. (6) There is the discoverer who has a 
flash of insight which makes a whole subject new, as 
Darwin and Wallace did in perceiving the importance of 
natural selection in the struggle for existence, as Mendel 
did in recognising the law of the inheritance of unit char- 
acters. (7) There is, finally, the discoverer, who must by 
no means be denied his due, who justifies and develops 
some idea which has been previously suggested, but has 
been lost sight of, or left without a sufficient body of facts. 
Thus, in connection with the inter-relations of insects and 
flowering-plants, some of Darwin's work was a develop- 
ment of Sprengers ; and thus, in connection with heredity, 
some of Bateson's work has been a vindication, extension, 
and development of Mendel's. Merz quotes from Helm- 
holtz a significant remark that he made in connection with 
the controversy over the merits of the various contribu- 
tions towards the doctrine of the conservation of energy : 
" The best ideas run the risk of remaining barren, if not 
accompanied by that energy which lasts till the convincing 
proof of their correctness has been given." 



A. BIOLOGY 

We begin our survey with the central science of Biology, 
which stands midway between Psychology and Sociology 
on the one side, Chemistry and Physics on the other. It is 
the science of organisms ; it deals with the forms of life — 



72 GERMAN CULTURE 

their structure, their activities, their continuance, develop- 
ment, and evolution. Instead of dividing it into its sub- 
sciences of Botany and Zoology, Bacteriology and Protis- 
tology, and so on, we shall refer more generally to (i) the 
study of vital activities (Physiology), (2) the study of 
structure (Morphology), (3) the study of development 
(Embryology), and (4) the study of evolution (Aetiology), 
with a few illustrative references to practical applications, 
e.g. in Medicine. 

To give a preliminary picture of how the nations stand, 
let us select four sets of twelve names prominent in the 
history of biological science and arrange them in parallel 
columns. We dare not draw any inference save that each 
set of twelve has made the world its debtor. There is, of 
course, no reason, save that of space-limits, for adhering 
in a Procrustean fashion to the number 12 ; it has the 
disadvantage of excluding many great names. (See page 
opposite.) 



I. PHYSIOLOGY 

Pioneers. — ^In his Lectures on the History of Physiology 
during the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries 
(1901), Sir Michael Foster deals with forty chief investi- 
gators, and of these three were of German birth — Fran- 
ciscus Sylvius of Hanover (1614-1672), whose name is 
familiar in connection with "the aqueduct of Sylvius'' in 
the brain ; G. E. Stahl of Anspach (1660-1734), the founder 
of " animism *' and the theory of phlogiston which lasted 
for a century ; and Brunner of Dieffenheim (1653-1727), 
who made experiments on digestion and discovered the 
glands since known by his name. Three out of forty is a 
small number, and the fact that Germany did not contri- 
bute largely to the physiology of these three centuries is 
made the more emphatic when we notice that Sir Michael 
Foster's list includes Vesalius, Harvey, Malpighi, Descartes, 
Borelli, Haller, and Spallanzani — all of them very great 



SCIENCE 73 



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74 GERIHAN CULTURE 

names. Harvey (1578-1657) is for ever famous not only 
for his demonstration of the circulation of the blood and 
analysis of some of the factors in its flow, but because he 
inaugurated a new epoch of observation and experiment. 
Haller (1708-1777), a Swiss, had something of his scientific 
temper, and from his great long-lived text-book, as well as 
from his researches on the nervous system, we may perhaps 
date the coming of age of physiology as a special science. 
Professor W. Rutherford has spoken of Haller as giving to 
physiology its present aspect, and Sir Michael Foster 
writes : " We have gone forward so much because we have 
laboured on Haller 's lines. He expounded the nervous 
system in a spirit which has become the modern spirit, and 
our progress has been due to our following his example.'' 

Functions of Organs. — When we pass from the work 
of Haller to that of Johannes Miiller (1801-1858), we feel 
at once in a new century. Chemistry and physics had 
made great strides, and he calls them to his aid in analysis. 
Yet he did not think that chemistry and physics could 
answer the physiologist's questions, and while he defended 
in his doctorial thesis the proposition : Psychologus nemo 
nisi physiologus, he was a convinced vitalist. We rank 
Johannes Miiller as a genius, as one of the great figures in 
the history of biological science, and we would support our 
opinion by quoting that of one of the wisest of modern 
physiologists. Sir John Burdon-Sanderson, who writes : 
" Just as there was no true philosophy of living nature 
until Darwin, we may with almost equal truth say that 
physiology did not exist as a science before Johannes 
Miiller. For although the sum of his numerous achieve- 
ments in comparative anatomy and physiology, notwith- 
standing their extraordinary number and importance, could 
not be compared for merit and fruitfulness with the one 
discovery which furnished the key to so many riddles, he, 
no less than Darwin, by his influence on his successors, 
was the beginner of a new era." He was a man of extra- 
ordinary scientific resource and co-ordinating capacity, and 



SCIENCE 75 

must be recognised as the founder of Comparative Physio- 
logy. On the foundations of Comparative Physiology as 
Miiller laid them, few have built with distinction ; of 
these few the most noteworthy are probably Metschnikoff, 
Krukenberg, Cuenot, Verworn, and Loeb. But the influ- 
ence of Johannes Miiller on general physiology and on 
medicine was greater. 

As we think of the vast number of investigations on 
the functions of organs, we see that they may be grouped on 
three or four lines, (i) The manifoldness of the functions 
of certain organs has been recognised, and there is no better 
illustration than the work of Claude Bernard (1813-1878) 
on the liver, or of Minkowski and von Mering on the pan- 
creas. (2) There has been an elucidation of enigmatical 
organs, as well illustrated by the work of Schiff and 
Baumann on the thyroid, of Marie, Schafer, and Herring 
on the pituitary body. (3) There has been a fuller under- 
standing of the correlation of organs in the life of the 
whole, as is splendidly illustrated by Sherrington's Integra- 
tive Action of the Nervous System. Another illustration 
is to be found in the study of internal secretions, which 
dates from Claude Bernard and Brown-Sequard, and has 
been continued with remarkable results by Pawlow, by 
Bayliss and Starling (who invented the word " hormones '' 
for a particular class of internal secretions), by Schafer, by 
Steinach, by Abderhalden, and many others. We may note 
that it was a Japanese investigator, Takamine, who suc- 
ceeded in isolating the active substance of the suprarenal 
glands (indicated by the experiments of Schafer and Oliver) 
and named it adrenalin. Its great value in stopping bleed- 
ing has been most beneficently utilised in surgery, especially 
along with a local anaesthetic, cocaine. 

In many cases the interlinked co-operation of workers of 
different nationalities is very intricate, and only an in- 
vestigator of the problem in question is in a position to 
say whose lever was most effective in getting at the truth 
Thus, if we take as an instance the function of the thymus 



76 GERMAN CULTURE 

glands — one of the riddles of the body — we have to take 
account of the contributions of A. von Kolliker, Stieda, His, 
Dohrn, GuUand, Maurer, Prenant, Beard, O. Schultze, and 
many more. 

From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards the 
study of the functions of organs has become increasingly 
experimental along chemical and physical lines. On the 
chemical side, we may mention : Wohler, Liebig, Claude 
Bernard, Pettenkofer, Voit, Ludwig, Pfliiger, Kiihne, 
Hoppe-Seyler,Bunge, Halliburton, Kossel, Heidenhain,Lea, 
Moore, Macallum. On the physical side, we may mention : 
Weber, Volkmann, Helmholtz, du Bois-Reymond, Marey, 
Fechner, Ludwig, Briicke, Pfliiger, Engelmann, Foster, 

Burdon-Sanderson, Gotch We do not think that it 

is easy to exaggerate the importance of German contribu- 
tions to physiological science. 

Properties of Tissues. — The foundation-stone of the 
physiology of tissues was laid by Xavier Bichat in his 
Anatomie Generate published in 1801, in which the body 
was analysed into its component tissues — nervous, muscu- 
lar, glandular, and so on — and the idea was advanced that 
the functions of organs might be expressed in terms of the 
tissues that compose them. We cannot do more than 
illustrate the elaboration of this idea by subsequent in- 
vestigators. Thus, taking one of the two master- activities 
of the body, that of the nervous system, which brings the 
creature into sensitive relations with its environment and 
integrates the whole behaviour, let us. notice how the in- 
vestigators of different nationalities have contributed to 
its elucidation, to the study, in other words, of one of the 
most important of human problems. 

In 1811 Charles Bell (1774-1842) announced (in a 
privately printed pamphlet !) his " New Idea " that the 
posterior or dorsal roots of the spinal nerves are sensory in 
function (conducting impulses centripetally), while the 
anterior or ventral roots are motor in function (conducting 
impulses centrifugally) — an ever memorable instance of 



SCIENCE 77 

biological insight. For, as Sir Michael Foster has said, 
*' our present knowledge of the nervous system is to a large 
extent only an exemplification and expansion of Charles 
Bell's ' New Idea,' and has its origin in that." Let us not 
forget that it was proved experimentally by Johannes 
Miiller, who was also the author of the not less important 
new idea that different kinds of stimuli applied to the 
same sense-organ and nerve always evoke the same kind of 
sensation. Vulpian in 1866 made the needed correction that 
the specificity is not in the nerves themselves, for they are 
merely conducting paths like telegraph wires, but in the 
nerve-centres or ganglia with which they are associated. 
This opened the way for the mapping out of the brain and 
the spinal cord, begun by Fritsch and Hitzig in 1870, 
seized upon as a promiseful method by David Ferrier, and 
thereafter prosecuted by a crowd of brilliant experimenters 
• — Munk, Beevor, Horsley, Goltz, Schafer, Sherrington, 
Gotch, Flechsig. And in connection with the nervous 
system we may here refer to Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818- 
1896), a German patriot of French descent (a pure Celt, he 
said), who ranks high for his life-long study of the electrical 
phenomena associated with nerve and muscle. Similarly 
Helmholtz will always be remembered in connection with 
the physiology of the eye and the ear. 

The Life of Cells. — Below the, functions of organs and 
the properties of tissues lies the vital activity of the com- 
ponent cells. If the body be likened to a city, the organs 
are comparable to the Town-House, the Market, the 
Power-Station, and so on, and the several tissues are like 
rows of similar shops or offices discharging similar functions. 
The cells are comparable to the inhabitants, and cannot 
be analysed into any lower order of biological indi- 
viduality. 

Now the recognition of cells as the structural and 
functional units of the organism was one of the great events 
in the history of biology. Speaking of the cell-theory, as 
the conclusion referred to is called. Professor E. B. Wilson of 



78 GERMAN CULTURE 

Columbia University, one of the leading cytologists of to- 
day (and much more than cytologist) has declared : '' No 
other biological generalisation, save only the theory of 
organic evolution, has brought so many apparently diverse 
phenomena under a common point of view, or has accom- 
plished more for the unification of knowledge/' 

Let us take this, then, as a test case, and observe how 
German investigators have contributed. We shall quote 
from Principal Sir William Turner : " Without hesitation 
I should say that one of the greatest achievements of 
biology in the nineteenth century was the recognition that 
plants and animals are composed of cells, or, more generally 
expressed, of numberless very minute, elementary organisms- 
By the co-operation of famous biologists — I mention only 
Purkinje, Schleiden and Schwann, Hugo von Mohl, NageH, 
Remak, KoUiker and Virchow, Briicke, Cohn and Max 
Schultze — our knowledge of the organisation of living 
substance has been greatly extended and deepened. In 
the theory of cells and protoplasm, anatomy and physio- 
logy secured a firm foundation similar to the theory of atoms 
and molecules in chemistry.*' It is surely very striking 
that all but two of the contributors named by this great 
authority are Germans, and with each of them it is quite 
easy to associate some definite step. 

If we pass from the general to the particular we get 
the same impression of the magnitude of German contri- 
butions to biological science. There are no cells more 
important for man to know about than nerve-cells, and 
here we have Waldeyer in 1891 formulating the important 
" Neuron Theory " that the body of the nerve-cell, its 
branching processes, its main nerve-fibre and the collateral 
branches thereof form a structural unit or a single cell. In 
this connection it is interesting to remember the important 
work of Augustus Waller (1816-1870) about forty years 
previously. In the same connection must be noted the 
investigations of Wilhelm His on the development of the 
nerve-cell and its outgrowths — a line of investigation 



SCIENCE 79 

brilliantly continued by the Spaniard Ramon y Cajal (to 
whom, along with the Italians Golgi and Marchi and the 
Germans Weigert, Ehrlich, and Nissl, great improvements 
in methods are due). Noteworthy recent contributions to 
our knowledge of the development of the nerve-cell have 
come from Carrel and Harrison in America. But as we 
think of nerve-cells, many other names come thronging 
through the mind — Kolliker, Remak, Retzius, Lenhossek, 
van Gehuchten, Ranvier, Biedermann and Hodge. 

Returning for a moment to a more general outlook, we 
venture to say that if an impartial assembly of biologists 
with physiological interests had been asked in July 1914 
to name the man who had done most of recent years to 
expound and demonstrate the importance of cellular physio- 
logy, the answer would have been Max Verworn. 

The Problem of Cell-Division. — One of the great un- 
solved problems of Biology is as to the conditions that 
bring about cell-division. There is a wealth of detailed 
information as to the process of cell-division in its various 
modes, but we do not know what sort of internal instability 
brings it about. Herbert Spencer, Leuckart and Dr. 
Alexander James appear to have independently suggested 
that in the growth of a typical cell the increase of volume 
soon outruns the increase of surface, and that the division 
of the cell into two restores the normal proportion. But 
this shows why cell-division is profitable, not what makes 
it occur. Richard Hertwig has laid great emphasis on the 
relation between the nucleus and the amount of cytoplasm 
which it can effectively control (to use a vague word), but 
this again is a suggestion of the reason for cell-division 
being the rule in organic growth rather than a discovery of 
the operative factors. The difficult problem, which takes 
us near to the fundamental characteristics of living matter, 
has been attacked by Marcus Hartog of Cork, Gallardo, 
Rhumbler, Assheton, and others. It remains an unsolved 
problem. 

Metabolism. — Below the study of the activities of the 



80 GERMAN CULTURE 

cells, which have a good deal of individuality about them, 
there is the study of the chemical processes of waste and 
repair, of disruption and construction, summed up in the 
term metabolism. De Blainville spoke of " a twofold in- 
ternal movement of composition and decomposition," and 
Claude Bernard of " disassimilating combustion and assimi- 
lating synthesis '' ; Hering at Prag and Gaskell at Cambridge 
contributed notably to the defining of the two closely- 
interwoven processes of down-breaking and upbuilding, of 
katabolism and anabolism. On this line we may rank the 
distinguished work of Pfliiger, Hoppe-Seyler (1825-1895), 
Kossel, Krukenberg, Fischer, Verworn, Reinke, Rode- 
wald, Abderhalden, Buchner, Czapek. Our impression is 
that German investigators have led the way in this kind of 
investigation. 

There are many names connected with the study of 
fermentation, but one of the most important within recent 
years is that of Buchner, who in 1897 did away with the 
time-honoured distinction between organised and un- 
organised ferments. It had been the custom to distinguish 
the fermenting work of living organisms like yeasts and 
bacteria from the fermenting work of non-living secretions, 
such as pepsin and diastase, but the distinction, quite 
useful in its way, was pressed too hard. What Buchner 
did was to grind yeast-cells in siliceous earth (diatom 
deposits) and squeeze out a fluid in which there were no 
living cells, but which could bring about alcoholic fermen- 
tation none the less. The same sort of experiment has 
been improved upon since, e.g. by Macfadyen, Morris and 
Rowland, with very valuable results, but we must not 
forget the man who took the step. 

Physiology of Plants. — ^The first large foundation- 
stone of plant-physiology was the Vegetable Statics (1727) of 
Stephen Hales (1677-1761), "in whom," Sachs says, "we 
see once more the genius of discovery and the sound, 
original reasoning powers of the great explorers of nature 
in Newton's age." His work was continued by Priestley 



SCIENCE 81 

(1733-1804), Ingen-Houss (1733-1799), Senebier (1742- 
1809), Theodore de Saussure (1767-1845), Liebig, and 
Boussingault — all of whom contributed notably to our 
understanding of the nutrition of plants. 

On another line we find that Hales found a successor 
in Andrew Knight (1758-1838), who experimented on the 
movements of plants, and was followed by Dutrochet. In 
1827, while a student, von Mohl published an essay on 
tendrils and climbing plants, " the best,'' Sachs said, " that 
appeared on the subject before Darwin wrote upon it in 
1865 " ; and in 1848 Briicke made a notable research on 
the sensitive plant. It is interesting that Charles Darwin's 
work on this line should have been so ably continued by 
his son. Professor Francis Darwin. Much progress has also 
rewarded the researches of Haberlandt, Pfeffer, Frank. 

It sometimes happens that one man's work raises 
the dignity of an entire science, and we think that this 
should be said of the influence exerted on Botany by 
Julius von Sachs (1832-1897). Great alike as teacher and 
investigator, he made a science of plant-physiology. His 
researches on growth and development, on the relations of 
the plant to external stimuli, and on the everyday functions 
were very important, and his invention of new methods 
not less so. His History of Botany is marked by its philo- 
sophical perspective, its fine style, and its enthusiastic 
appreciation of discoverers of all nations. 

Continuance of the Race. — Although Britain has 
long been famous for its stock-breeding, there has been 
little systematic study of sex and reproduction till within 
recent years. Apart from Encyclopaedia articles, there was 
not for many years, outside of Germany, any counterpart 
of Hensen^s Physiologie der Zeugung. Darwin had, of course, 
paid great attention to Sexual Selection, and there had been 
much discussion of this theory, but there were few (if any) 
general surveys in English or French before The Evolution 
of Sex, by Geddes and Thomson, in 1889. Now we have 
Marshall's Physiology of Reproduction — a comprehensive 

F 



82 GERMAN CULTURE 

treatise of great merit. The work of Giard and Delage on the 
remarkable effects which are brought about in crabs by the 
parasitism of Saccuhna and similar forms has been followed 
up and extended by Geoffrey Smith and Potts, and has 
thrown much light on some of the problems of sex. Smith's 
studies in the experimental analysis of sex are fundamental 
contributions to the subject. To Steinach in particular 
we owe the elucidation of the role of internal secretions in 
evoking the development of secondary sex-characters — an 
idea which was probably first developed by Brown-Sequard 
— and here should also be mentioned the work of Tandler, 
Grosz, Kammerer, and Bucura. 

To American cytologists, in particular (Wilson, M 'Clung, 
T. H. Morgan, Stevens, Sutton), is due the discovery of the 
accessory chromosome and its probable significance as a 
sex-determinant. The study of sex as a Mendelian char- 
acter and of sex-linked characters is especially associated 
with Bateson, Castle, Correns, Doncaster, T. H. Morgan, and 
Punnett. The important work of Maupas on the reproduc- 
tion of Infusorians has been continued with fine results by 
Calkins, Jennings, Joukowsky, and Woodruff. 

The Web of Life. — We have been referring to the 
physiology of the individual organism, but there is a " higher 
physiology*' of organisms in their relations to one another 
and to their environment. This is sometimes called ecology 
or bionomics, and a single illustration may be given. One of 
the most valuable contributions that the naturaHst has made 
to the general thinking of educated men is the concept of 
"the web of life,'' the correlation of organisms, the inter- 
relatedness of things in nature. Nothing lives or dies to 
itself, nothing is isolated ; nature is a vast system of inter- 
relations. Earthworms have made most of the fertile soil 
of the earth ; cats have to do with next year's clover crop ; 
eighty seeds may germinate from one clodlet on one bird's 
foot. These are Darwinian instances, and all the world 
admits that Darwin more than any naturalist before or 
since realised " the significance of the linkages which join 



SCIENCE 83 

life to life." It is very interesting, however, to recall a 
remarkable pioneer — all but forgotten till Darwin remem- 
bered him. That was Christian Konrad Sprengel (1750- 
1816), Brandenburger and Berliner, who published in 1793 
The Secret of Nature discovered in the Structure and Fertilisa- 
tion of Flowers, in which he showed the mutual adaptations 
of flowers and insects in a manner which Darwin described 
as being "full of truth,'' although "with some little non- 
sense.'' Humboldt was another of the pre-Darwinians 
who had the vision of the web of life, and it is pleasant to 
recall that he also had his influence on Darwin. 

Before leaving Sprengel we may call attention to the 
fact that, although his work was ignored by his contem- 
poraries, Germany gave him his reward in the long run, for 
there have been many notable German workers in the field 
centred in the fertihsation of flowers. Hermann Miiller must 
be ranked along with Delpino, Hildebrand, and Kerner. 

Naturalist Travellers. — ^There are a good many well- 
known names on the chronological list before we come to 
the first great German, and that is probably due to the long- 
restricted sea-board. We recall Marco Polo of Venice, 
Edward Wotton {d, 1555), the Swiss Gesner [d. 1565), the 
Italian Aldrovandi [d. 1605), the Scotsman Johnson 
{d. 1675), the Frenchman Belon, Thomas Pennant; and 
then we come upon two famous Germans, Peter Simon 
Pallas (1741-1811) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769- 

1859). 

Pallas is memorable for his zoological exploration of 

Russia and Siberia (and many people know of the occasional 

incursions of Pallas 's Sand-Grouse into Britain), for the 

width of his competent knowledge (zoloogy, ethnology, 

geology, &c.), and for his shrewd questionings in regard to 

gaographical distribution, the influence of climate, the 

variations of animals, and similar topics. Alexander von 

Humboldt was one of the greatest (and one of the last) of 

the all-round naturahsts. He was one of the beginners of 

the scientific study of the geographical distribution of 



84 GERMAN CULTURE 

plants and animals — pointing on to Alfred Russel Wallace 
and his successors. The author of Cosmos is to be for ever 
held in admiration as a truly magnificent type of the natura- 
list-traveller, observant, widely interested, reflective, reach- 
ing forward to Darwin in the success with which he realised 
the complexity of the inter-relations in nature. 

The Columbus- voyage of Biology was Darwin's voyage 
on the Beagle, for it discovered a new world, and the journey- 
ings of his magnanimous fellow-worker, Alfred Russel 
Wallace, shared in this glory. We go on to think of Bates 
and Belt, with whom we may place the German naturalist, 
A. E. Brehm (1829-1884), whose Tierleben has had a great 
influence in broadening Natural History, and Fritz M tiller, 
whose Filr Darwin was a notable contribution in its day. 
In the Challenger expedition, associated especially with the 
names of Sir W'yville Thomson and Sir John Murray, Britain 
took the lead in the scientific exploration of the sea, and of 
the deep sea in particular, but many countries have fol- 
lowed that up with enthusiasm, and there is no picking and 
choosing between the results of the great explorations 
which have gone forth from France and Germany and 
Holland, from Norway and America and Monaco. 

The particular type of reflective naturalist-traveller 
interested in biological problems at least as much as in 
discovering new organisms, was for a time very distinctively 
British, which we attribute largely to the greater facilities 
for travelling. Since the time of Semper, whose Animal 
Life is a masterpiece, this type has been excellently repre- 
sented in Germany. 

Vitalism. — Many different positions are included within 
the term '* vitalism,'' but if we use it in a wide sense to 
mean the doctrine that the concepts and formulae of physics 
and chemistry do not suffice for the adequate description 
of the activities of organisms (in growth, development, be- 
haviour, and variation), then we may record as vitalists 
a few German investigators such as Johannes Miiller, 
Liebig, Wohler, Roux, Rindfleisch, and Reinke. But they 



SCIENCE S5 

seem to be in a small minority. On the other hand, the most 
carefully and consistently thought-out doctrine of positive 
vitaHsmx, advancing to a constructive theory of Entelechy, 
will be found in the Gifford Lectures deUvered in Aberdeen 
by Hans Driesch. 

Bio-PsYCHOLOGY. — Howcvcr we may interpret what is 
called the relation between body and mind, we must allow 
that biology and psychology join hands in the study of 
animal behaviour. Psychology is pre-eminently the science 
of mental processes, but these are correlated with brain- 
processes, and these with the life of the organism as a 
whole. The mental processes cannot be explained or re- 
described as special complications of processes that are not 
mental, but there is a correlation or concomitance or unity 
which cannot be ignored, however it may be interpreted. 
Let us recall the names of some of those who have worked 
at the problem of '' the correlation of mind and body." 
Perhaps the two best books on the subject are British and 
German — MacDougall's Body and Mind and Busse's Korper 
und Geist, The Germans have the credit of Gall (1758- 
1828) andSpurzheim (1776-1832), who founded phrenology, 
doubtless an erroneous system, but of service notwithstand- 
ing. A great step was taken in 181 1 when Charles Bell 
discovered the distinction between motor and sensory 
nerves, corroborated by Johannes Miiller and Magendie, 
and another in 1832 when Marshall Hall elucidated the 
phenomenon of reflex action, and another in 1861 when 
Broca (1824-1880), following the pioneer work of Flourens 
and Boillard, discovered the centre of speech in the cerebral 
hemispheres. That led on to the work of cerebral localisa- 
tion in the hands of men like Fritsch, Hitzig, Ferrier, 
Hughlings Jackson, Franck, Pitres, Munk, Goltz, Horsley, 
Gowers, Schafer, Flechsig, Schrader, Steiner, Marie. It 
seems likely, as Loeb and others have indicated, that the 
idea of ** brain-centres " has been pushed too far, but it 
has been of great service, and Germany has done its 
share. 



86 GERMAN CULTURE 

Experimental Psychology. — It is easy enough to make 
vague, depreciatory statements, as some eminent authorities 
have done, regarding the contributions of German investi- 
gators to science, but the advantage of taking a scientific 
survey of the facts, as we have tried to do, is to disclose 
fields in which the German contributions stand out pre- 
eminently. One of these fields is Experimental Psychology. 
Most of the work dates from 1878, when Wundt opened 
his laboratory of physiological psychology at Leipzig, and 
most of the present-day investigators along this line have 
admitted their indebtedness to this master. 

Before Wundt, there was pioneer work of importance. 
Thus Johannes Miiller (1801-1858), who adorned whatever 
he touched, established the law of the '* specific energy of 
the senses'' — ^that the same stimulus acting on different 
sense-organs produces different kinds of sensations, while 
different kinds of stimuli acting on the same sense-organ 
produce the same kind of sensation. Of this law Bunge 
says that it is '' the greatest and deepest truth ever thought 
out by the human intellect," and Helmholtz, with equal 
hyperbole, compared it to the law of gravitation. It has 
been criticised by Lewes, Wundt, and others. Another 
pioneer was Ernst H. Weber (1795-1878), who, helped by 
his gifted brothers Wilhelm and Eduard, introduced pre- 
cise methods into bio-psychology and tried to discover the 
relation between intensity of sense-stimuli, objectively 
measured, and the intensity of the associated sensation. 
Nor can we forget the investigations of Helmholtz on sight 
and hearing, and his measurement of the velocity of nerve- 
messages (185 1) — a very important step ; or of Fechner 
(1801-1887), who devoted much attention to Weber's Law 
(as he called it), and was the first to speak of Psycho- 
physics. Beside Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology 
(1855) should be ranked Lotze's Medicinische Psychologic, 
oder Physiologic dcr Scclc, Among those who have worked 
along lines similar in a general way to those which Wundt 
has followed we may note : Herbart (1776-1841), Benecke 



SCIENCE 87 

(1798-1854), Bethe, Ebbinghaus, Ribot, James, Pierre 
Janet, Kraepelin, Ladd, Lipps, Loeb, Mtinsterberg, 
Titchener. 

Comparative Psychology. — Another line of research is 
that of comparative psychology, as illustrated, for instance, 
in the study of instinctive behaviour at various levels of 
organisation. We recall the names of many investigators 
and thinkers: Bethe, Bohn, Btichner, Samuel Butler, 
Darwin, Forel, Groos, G. H. Lewes, Loeb, Wesley Mills, 
Lloyd Morgan, J.J. Murphy, Romanes, Schneider, Spalding, 
Spencer, Thorndike, Uexkiill, Vogt, Wallace, Wasmann, 
Weismann, C. O. Whitman, Ziegler. It seems fair to 
recognise Romanes (1848-1894) as having done much to 
put Comparative Psychology on a sound basis, and Britain 
has, of course, good reason to be proud of the experimental 
work of Lloyd Morgan and of the construction which he 
has based upon it, but, on the whole, we cannot recognise 
here what seemed plain in connection with Experimental 
Psychology, that the work emanating from any one 
nationality is pre-eminent. The bio-psychological inquiries 
on the behaviour of Protozoa made by Verworn in Bonn, 
and by Binet in Paris, were very interesting, but Jennings, 
at Johns Hopkins, has long since gone much farther. The 
ingenious and keenly-critical work of Jacques Loeb in 
America is of the first rank, though dogmatically mechan- 
istic, but that of Georges Bohn in France is just as fine. A 
fine study like that of Groos on the play of animals 
may be balanced by that of Espinas on animal societies, or 
Freud's study of dreams by Bergson's. We associate the 
genetic study of psychology with the work of Herbert 
Spencer, Darwin, Mark Baldwin, Stanley Hall, Freud, and 
others, but we must remember the notable beginning of 
careful child-study which Preyer made long ago in Jena. 
What interpretation is to be given to the alleged arith- 
metical feats of the thinking horses of Elberfeld remains 
uncertain. 



88 GERMAN CULTURE 



2. MORPHOLOGY 



Just as physiology is the study of functions and habits, so 
morphology is the study of organic form and structure. 
In both cases there has been a gradually deepening analysis 
of the organism and its vital activities, a penetration from 
the creature as a whole to the organs, the tissues, the cells, 
and the living matter itself. But the morphologist has to 
do with more than structural analysis ; he has to find unity 
amid manifoldness, to disclose the styles and principles of 
organic architecture, to provide the basis for a rational, 
that is, genetic, classification. 

Foundations. — The founders of modem morphology 
appear to us to have been Cuvier and Goethe. To Cuvier 
(1769-1832) the science owes not only a broad basis of 
comparative anatomy, but the idea of utilising this in 
classification, an insistence on the correlation of parts (the 
creature being always a consistent unity), and an apprecia- 
tion of the significance of fossils. To Goethe, poet-natura- 
list though he was, the debt is perhaps even greater, simply 
because of the clearness with which he discerned and pro- 
claimed the fundamental morphological idea of unity under- 

, lying diversity. In 1790 he published a famous essay in 

which he showed for flowering plants the fundamental unity 
of foliar and floral organs. Many had worked towards 
this idea — ^Joachim Jung (1678), Linnaeus (1760, 1763), the 
embryologist C. F. Wolff, and others— but Goethe expressed 
it in generalised form. There is, however, considerable 
difference of opinion as to the value of Goethe's theory. 
That it has been re-edited in recent times is almost im- 

I material, for it was the morphological idea in general that 

was important. In the same way, although his theory of 
the skull as made up of a number of modified vertebrae (as 
Oken had also suggested) was demolished by jieichert, 

|i Ratke, Gegenbaur, and Huxley, it was a flash of morpho- 

" logical genius, and to many it will not seem such a great 



SCIENCE 89 

matter that we should now speak of the segmentation of 
the head, whereas Goethe thought of the segmentation of 
the skull. We are tempted to speak of his reflections on 
individuality, correlation, division of labour, and the like, 
but it may be more illustrative of his temper to refer to 
his discovery of a small bone in front of the upper jaw in 
man. Writing to Herder he said : ''I must hasten to tell 
you of a piece of good fortune that has happened to me. 
I have found — neither gold nor silver, but what gives me 
inexpressible delight — the intermaxillary bone in man.'' 
It had been supposed that man was distinctive in having 
no such bone, and what so much delighted Goethe was the 
confirmation of the all-pervading unity of structure between 
man and other mammals. The discovery was made inde- 
pendently by Oken, but the same must be said of Vicq 
d'Azyr who was also marked by shrewd morphological 
insight. 

Great Comparative Anatomists. — ^The foundations of 
comparative anatomy were laid by Cuvier. But the his- 
torical succession shows the influence of another strain, 
that of the evolutionary anatomists, like Goethe and 
fitienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire. From these, as well as from 
Cuvier, there is, through Blumenbach, Meckel, Camper, John 
Hunter and others, with Owen as a transition-type, an 
affiliation with more modern comparative anatomists like 
Gegenbaur (i 826-1 903), Lacaze-Duthiers, Huxley, W. K. 
Parker, Lankester, Cope. Starting again from Goethe, 
there has been an evolution of botanical comparative 
anatomists, the two Jussieus and A. Pyrame de CandoUe 
in France ; Schleiden, Alex. Braun, Hofmeister, De Bary, 
and Sachs, and onwards to van Tieghem, Schwendener, 
Goebel, and many others of all nations. 

Morphological Ideas. — ^The achievements of the com- 
parative anatomists are too technical for discussion here, 
but we may refer briefly to some general morphological 
ideas. With Cuvier we may associate the idea of the 
correlation of organs (which he greatly exaggerated), that 



iK) GERMAN CULTURE 

the organism is a unified integrate, within which certain 
kinds of structures, and not others, are compatible. With 
Owen we may associate the defining of the distinction 
between the resemblance of two or more structures in 
fundamental architecture and development [homology) and 
a resemblance in function [analogy). This was elaborated 
by L. Agassiz and Bronn, Haeckel and Mivart; and Sir 
Ray Lankester added (in 1870) the important category of 
homoplasty or convergence for that close agreement in form 
which unrelated organisms may exhibit owing to their 
being similarly adapted to similar conditions of life. To 
Spencer credit must be given for his clear analysis of the 
meaning of many everyday conceptions, such as differentia- 
tion and integration. To Dohrn we owe the fertile idea 
that an apparently novel structure seems often to have 
arisen in the course of evolution from an old structure, 
with an associated change of function. To Dohrn and to 
Lankester we also owe a useful insistence on the occurrence 
of retrogressive changes (or degeneration) in the course of 
evolution, which is certainly by no means always on an 
onward and upward line. To Kleinenberg is due the subtle 
idea of the substitution of organs, which may be illustrated 
by the way in which the old-fashioned endodermic axis or 
notochord prepares the way for, and usually gives place to, 
its mesodermic substitute — the backbone. We venture to 
say that no one who has read Haeckel's Generelle Morpho- 
logic (1866) will be inclined to maintain that Germany has 
not contributed her share to the by no means large stock 
of general morphological ideas. 

Science of Shapes. — On the tomb of the anatomist 
Goodsir there is graven a logarithmic spiral, such as one 
sees so often in organisms, in shell and horn, in bud and 
cone. It is indeed of such frequent occurrence that Goodsir 
believed that a careful study of it would lead to the dis- 
covery of some principle or law of growth. Several thinkers 
have been on the same track — Leonardo da Vinci, Sir John 
Leslie, Canon Moseley, the botanist A. H. Church, and 



SCIENCE 91 

recently Mr. J. Th. Cook, who has made a careful and 
ingenious study of spirals in nature and in art. There are 
two distinct questions — (i) What may be the utility, or 
survival value, of this spiral form which has such abundant 
outcrop in nature ? and (2) What physical forces of surface- 
tension, pressure, cohesion, and the like are operative in 
moulding organic form ? This is an important study — a sort 
of borderland between biology and physics — to which little 
attention has been paid in this country, though the subject 
has been illumined in several studies by Prof. D'Arcy W. 
Thompson. We wish to point out that as early as 1866 
Ernst Haeckel gave it special attention under the title 
Pro-morphology. 

The Microscope. — Harvey made his observations on 
the developing chick, for instance, with the aid of a simple 
lens ; and it is an eloquent testimony to his powers of 
observation that he saw as much as he did. But the in- 
vention of the compound microscope opened up a new 
world. It was not merely that everything could now be seen 
magnified several hundred times, which might have made 
as little difference to science as doubling everyone's income 
would make in economics ; the important gain was the 
disclosure of agents and operations previously quite un- 
known. We need not mention more than a few examples — 
protozoa, yeast-plants, bacteria, spermatozoa, phagocytes, 
nerve-endings, cell-division, and the process of secretion. 
The invention of the compound microscope has been claimed 
for Galileo (about 1610), Hans and Zacharias Janssen 
(between 1590 and 1609), Drebbel (1621), and Fontana 
(1618). Among the early microscopists of note were 
Leeuwenhoek, Malpighi, Hooke, Grewe. 

Comparative Histology. — It is a commonplace now, 
but it was a great step that Bichat took in 1801 when he 
showed that the organs with which the comparative anato- 
mist was wont to deal may be analysed into component 
tissues — muscular, nervous, glandular, and so on. Bichat 's 
foundation was but slowly utilised, for although detailed 



92 GERMAN CULTURE 

observations on tissues and cells accumulated rapidly after 
1838, there was no broad comparative treatment of im- 
portance until Leydig published his remarkable Comparative 
Histology in 1857. So far as we know, the best comparative 
presentations of histological analysis are still to be found in 
the German successors of Leydig 's text-book — for instance, 
in Oppel's co-operative treatise. 

The Cell Theory. — There were various approxima- 
tions to the '' Cell Theory '' — and it may be of interest to 
mention Wolff (1759), Mirbel, von Baer (1828, a remarkable 
prophetic statement), Turpin (1826), Meyen (1830), Raspail 
(1831), Robert Brown (1835), Johannes Miiller, 1835, Du- 
trochet (1837), Dujardin, Purkinje, von Mohl, Valentin, 
Unger, Nageli, Hofmeister, Henle. Thus gradually was 
the way paved for the formulation of the '* Cell Theory/' or 
better, '' Cell Doctrine '' in 1838-1839, by Schwann (1810- 
1882), and Schleiden (1804-1881) — one of the greatest steps* 
in the development of biological science. Louis Agassiz, f 
not being an evolutionist, spoke of it as " the greatest 
discovery in the natural sciences in modern times." Professor 
E. B. Wilson, one of those who have most successfully con- 
tributed to its development, says, '* It must be placed beside 
the evolution-theory as one of the foundation-stones of 
modern biology.*' Our present point is that its statement , 
and early development was mainly due to German] 
investigators. 

In 1838 Schleiden showed that plants were built up of] 
cells and transformations of cells, and discovered the origin \ 
of the plant-embryo to be an egg-cell or ovum. In 1839 
Schwann extended these two observations to animals, and 
thus the Cell Theory was formulated. It implies the follow- 
ing propositions : (i) All plants and animals have a cellular 
structure, being either single cells (Protozoa, Protophytes, 
and Protists) or built up of integrates of cells and modi- 
fications of cells ; (2) every multicellular organism, repro- 
duced in the ordinary way, begins its life as a single cell (the I 
fertiUsed ovum), which divides and re-divides to build up a ' 



SCIENCE 93 

body ; and (3) the functions of a multicellular organism are 
expressible in part in terms of the activities of its component 
cells. In the last connection great importance must be 
attached to the work of Goodsir (1845) and Virchow (1858), 
who showed that in normal and pathological conditions 
alike the life of the whole may be spelt out in the activities 
ot the component cells. Among those who were quick to 
apply the Cell Theory in the study of development may be 
mentioned Reichert, Henle, Remak and Kolliker. To take 
the last-mentioned, whom we deliberately include as German, 
although he happened to be born in Zurich, it seems quite 
impossible not to admit the magnitude of his work, both 
qualitatively and quantitatively. As we have said else- 
where : ''he helped in establishing the cell theory, he traced 
the origin of tissues from the segmenting ovum through the 
developing embryo, he demonstrated the continuity between 
nerve-fibres and nerve-cells of vertebrates (1845), he isolated 
the elements of smooth muscle (1848), he did lasting work in 
connection with the development of the skull and the back- 
bone (1849-1850), and much more, all in the early years of 
his scientific activity. From 1850 till the end of the cen- 
tury hardly a year went past without some important 
histological, embryological, or anatomical work from Von 
Kolliker, as may be readily verified by turning up the 
famous Zeitschrift fur wissenschaftliche Zoologie, which he 
founded in 1848 along with Von Siebold/' ^ 

The question may be fairly raised, however, whether the 
Cell Theory, for which we have been claiming so much, is 
really quite sound. The answer should be, we think, that 
all these generalisations must develop with the growth of 
knowledge. Thus it must be recognised that the cells of 
the body are integrated elements of a unified whole, which 
is somehow more than the sum of its parts ; that, as the 
late Professor Adam Sedgwick was wont to emphasize, some 
embryos remain for a considerable time in the state of 
protoplasmic masses or syncytia with many nuclei but no 

* Science of Life ^ Blackie, 1899, p. 104. 



^ 



94 GERMAN CULTURE 

cell-boundaries ; that the growth of the mass of living 
matter is the primary fact, to which the cell-divisions adapt 
themselves — as was conclusively shown by Hofmeister, 
De Bary, and Sachs. Yet it seems certain that the Cell 
Theory, not as a dogma, but as a living doctrine, has done 
more for Biology than any other generalisation, save that 
of Evolution. 

Protoplasm. — In regard to the Cell Theory it may be 
said that we are forgetting our fellow-countryman, Robert 
Hooke, to whom the very word '' cell,'' as a biological term, 
is due. But the idea he reached from his study of cork and 
wood was that of minute boxes without contents, the walls 
being therefore regarded as the vital parts. Even Schwann 
and Schleiden were not free from the error of attaching more 
importance to the walls of the box than to what these in- 
closed, and the full import of the cell theory was not clearly 
seen until 1861, when another German, Max Schultze, 
riveted attention on the living matter itself. Many investi- 
gators had been working towards this along various lines. 
Thus in 1835 a French zoologist, Felix Dujardin, had 
studied the living matter which streams from within 
the shells of Foraminifera, or chalk-forming animalcules, 
and had called it " sarcode,'' thinking it to be simpler than 
the formative material of higher organisms ; Purkinje in 
1839 compared the substance of the animal embryo, to 
which he gave the name " protoplasm," with the " cambium " 
of plant-cells ; in 1846 Hugo Von Mohl described the viscid 
cell-substance in plant-cells and used the word protoplasm 
to denote it and the nucleus as well ; in 1849 Ecker com- 
pared the contractile substance of muscles with the living 
matter of Amoebae ; Bonders also referred the contractility 
from the walls to the contents ; Cohn of Breslau suspected 
that the '' sarcode '' of animals and the " protoplasm '* of 
plants must be " in the highest degree analogous substances." 
Finally, in 1861, Max Schultze formulated the growing con- 
viction that "sarcode," ''protoplasm," and the like were 
different terms for the living substance that forms more or 



SCIENCE 95 

less of every cell — the " physical basis of life " in Huxley's 
phrase. To show how far this is from being any personal 
reading of history, with a bias of gratitude to German 
Universities, let us quote a paragraph from Professor E. B. 
Wilson's great book on the cell : *' The full physiological 
significance of protoplasm, its identity with the ' sarcode ' 
of the unicellular forms, and its essential similarity in plants 
and animals, was first clearly placed in evidence through the 
classical works of Max Schultze and De Bary, beside which 
should be placed the earlier works of Dujardin, Unger, 
Nageli and Mohl, and that of Cohn, Huxley, Virchow, 
Leydig, Briicke, Kiihne, and Beale/' It was a unifying con- 
clusion of the first importance and did not German investi- 
gators contribute largely to its establishment ? 

More Recent Work. — ^The cell that seemed so simple 
at first has become a complicated microcosm. Within its 
wall or membrane is the cytoplasm with an intricate 
organisation, and including " chromidia,'' " plastosomes/' 
and other definite structures ; the nucleus is another little 
world with its chromatin beads on bands of linin, its 
achromatin, its nucleoli, and much more ; even the centro- 
somes which play an important part in cell-division are the 
centres of other complications. This organisation, which 
is beginning to be understood, has been made clear to us 
by a multitude of investigators, criticising one another, 
confirming one another, in any case making towards a 
secure knowledge which will be of great value both theo- 
retically and practically. It is difficult to select names, 
but one recalls the work of Auerbach, Boveri, Biitschli, 
Carnoy, Flemming, Fol, Guignard, O. & R. Hertwig, 
Strasburger, Van Beneden. 

If we take the structure of the cytoplasm, as a problem 
by itself, we find some investigators, like Frommann and 
Arnold, describing an intricate network ; others, like 
Flemming, a tangled skein of fibrils ; others, like Altmann, 
a crowd of granules in a gelatinous matrix ; others, like 
Biitschli, a fine alveolar or vacuolar appearance like that 



96 GERMAN CULTURE 

of an emulsion. Perhaps it was Brucke in 1861 who first 
began to realise the significant complexity of the cell- 
substance, pointing on in his theory of " Elementarorganis- 
men/* between the cell and the molecule, to the important 
modem discovery of specific " plastosomes " (they get many 
other names) which are associated with particular differ- 
entiations or definite functions within the cell. Of great 
importance also were the studies of Quincke on the physical 
properties of protoplasm. 

One would like to be able to refer to Professor Patrick 
Geddes's luminous conception of the cell-cycle ; to the 
demonstration of specificity in the similar cells of different 
animals, an epithelial cell from the windpipe of a horse 
being distinguishable from a similar unit from a dog ; to 
the suggestive unity amid manifoldness that obtains in the 
ordinary forms of nuclear division or karyokinesis through- 
out the realm of organisms ; to the interesting fact that 
each organism has a definite number of chromosomes in the 
nuclei of all the cells of the body : thus man, the mouse, 
and the lily have twenty- four ; and to a score of other 
developments of the Cell Theory. We can but say that 
German investigators have done their full share in the 
advancement of Cytology. A brief reference must be made 
to micro-organisms in the wide sense. 

Minute Organisms. — In his Ansichten der Natur, and 
again in his Cosmos, Alexander von Humboldt spoke of the 
impressive ubiquity of life — of the " Allbelebtheit " of land 
and sea. Organisms penetrate everywhere — above the 
snow-line and down into the great oceanic "deeps" in 
which Mount Everest would be lost to view. For one 
organism that is seen there may be a hundred unseen, or 
even more than that if we take microscopic organisms into 
account. We may associate with Pasteur in particular the 
evidence of the ubiquity of Bacteria and an appreciation 
of the manifold ways in which they insinuate themselves 
into the bundle of life. In a similar connection, but with 
reference to the Protozoa, we may justly remember Chr. 



SCIENCE 97 

G. Ehrenberg (1795-1876), a renowned microscopist, who 
did much to disclose both the abundance and the practical 
importance of these smallest and simplest of animals. 
Germany has been pecuUarly rich, it seems to us, in in- 
vestigators of the Protozoa ; we think at once of Haeckel 
and his great monograph on Radiolarians, of Biitschli's 
life-long work, of R. Hertwig at Munich, and of Schaudinn, 
who was one of the first to demonstrate the degree to 
which Protozoa are responsible for disease {e.g. Sleeping 
Sickness, Syphilis). The Malaria organism was discovered 
in 1880 by a French investigator, Laveran. In connection 
with bacteriology, the names of Pasteur and De Bary, 
Cohn, and Koch (1843-1910), Duclaux and Roux, Haffkine, 
and a score of others at once rise in the mind. 

Classification of Animals. — One of the ends of mor- 
phology is to work out a natural classification which should 
also be to some extent a system of pedigrees. It may be 
said that while there have been many careful classifiers, 
there have been few great taxonomists, few who have 
detected unsuspected affinities or have established order 
within a whole group. John Ray (1628-1705), whom Sir 
Ray Lankester calls "the father of modem zoology,*' was 
undoubtedly great in so far as he laid emphasis on anato- 
mical characteristics as a basis of classification ; Linnaeus 
(1707-1778) was still greater ; Lamarck made some pro- 
gress in setting backboneless animals in order ; Cuvier 
emphasized the anatomical basis and utilised fossil forms ; 
Von Baer (i 792-1 876) was one of the first to see clearly 
that embryological results gave a clue to relationships, and 
Johannes Miiller (1801-1858) applied the same idea to 
Invertebrates. 

The mark of greatness is seen in Kowalewsky's recogni- 
tion of the affinities between Ascidians and Lancelets (1866) ; 
in Vaughan Thompson's discovery of the Crustacean char- 
acter of barnacles ; in W. K. Parker's comparative studies 
on the development of the skull ; in much of Huxley's 
work, e.g. the division of Vertebrates into Ichthyopsida, 

G 



98 GERMAN CULTURE 

Sauropsida, and Mammals ; in some of Cope's studies on 
extinct Reptiles. To Sir Ray Lankester modem zoological 
taxonomy probably owes more than to any other in- 
vestigator. 

Classification of Plants. — ^The ideal of the classifica- 
tion of organisms is a '' natural system/' based on signi- 
ficant resemblances, which may be detected by anatomical, 
embryological, or palaeontological investigations. As 
regards plants, this idea had been present to Caesalpinius 
and had found partial expression in the Systema Naturce of 
Linnaeus. Outstanding among many workers stand the 
figures of Laurent de Jussieu (1774-1836) and A. Pyramme 
de CandoUe (1778-1841). Robert Brown was one of the 
first to show how embryological investigation comes as an 
aid to anatomy, and we owe to him in the main such im- 
portant steps as the distinguishing of Angiosperms and 
Gymnosperms. But on this path the epoch-making dis- 
coveries were those of Hofmeister (1849, ^85^)? '' magni- 
ficent beyond all that has been achieved before or since in 
the domain of descriptive botany" (Sachs), changing the 
whole idea of plant-development, disclosing the alternation 
of generations that is the clue to the genetic affinities of 
Cryptogams and Phanerogams. In this connection Sachs 
writes : '* That which Haeckel, after the appearance of 
Darwin's book, called the phylogenetic method, Hofmeister 
had long before actually carried out, and with magnificent 
success. When Darwin's theory was given to the world 
eight years after Hofmeister's investigations, the relations 
of affinity between the great divisions of the vegetable 
kingdom were so well established and so patent, that the 
theory of descent had only to accept what genetic mor- 
phology had actually brought to view.*' Among those who 
have followed Hofmeister' s lead may be mentioned Pring- 
sheim, Nageli, De Bary, Thuret, Bornet, and the greatest of 
these was De Bary (1831-1888). We are proud in Britain 
of the work of Sir J. D. Hooker (1817-1911) ; perhaps that 
of Engler may be named as its parallel in Germany. 



SCIENCE 99 

Palaeontology. — It is the task of palaeontology to 
spell out the history of the past so far as that can be de- 
ciphered in the graveyards of the fossil-bearing rocks, to 
trace the rise and fall of plant and animal races, and to 
disclose the sublime spectacle of life's progress. Who have 
been the great palaeontologists ? 

Apart from anticipatory flashes on the part of Leonardo 
da Vinci, Bernard Palissy, Steno, Martin Lister, and a few 
others who recognised the significance of fossils. Palaeonto- 
logy cannot be said to have begun before the beginning of 
the nineteenth century, when Cuvier worked at Tertiary 
mammals, Lamarck at molluscs, Brongniart at plants, and 
William Smith at the bearing of fossils on stratigraphical 
problems. 

In the first half of the nineteenth century the doctrines 
of the Cuvierian school were dominant ; many important 
fossils were unearthed and carefully described, but not with 
the evolutionist's eye. The work of Owen (1804-1893), 
Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), and Bronn was in some respects 
transitional, for they had the idea of a progressive succes- 
sion. Thus we find that Agassiz dwells on the parallelism 
between the embryonic development of recent fishes and the 
geological series, and suggests the recapitulation idea that 
the history of the individual epitomises that of the race — 
an idea with which he may have been inspired by Oken at 
Heidelberg or by Dollinger at Munich. The dawn of 
evolutionary palaeontology practically dates from Darwin's 
Origin of Species (1859), and many beautiful phylogenetic 
series have been worked out, e.g. of extinct Cephalopods, 
by Hyatt, Wiirtenberger, Branco and others. As a dis- 
coverer of interesting fossils Marsh played an important 
part. Huxley dealt critically with the palaeontological 
^' evidences of evolution," and his '' American Addresses " 
' had a great influence. Cope (1840-1879) is notable for his 
1 numerous brilliant and sometimes impetuous generalisa- 
: tions, and it seems fair to say that America stands very high 
tfor its contributions to palaeontology. Gaudry's Enchaine- 



100 GERMAN CULTURE 

ments du Monde animal dans les temps geologiques (1878- 
1896) was an achievement in its presentation of the long 
succession of faunas. Neumayr, Waagen, Solms-Laubach, 
Osbom, and others should be mentioned, but it seems just 
to single out von Zittel (1839-1904), and that not only 
because of his investigations and the marvellous text-book 
over which he spent so many years, but because of his 
remarkable influence as a teacher. 

Conclusion. — When we think of the work of men like 
Goethe, C. F. Wolff, Meckel, DoUinger, Alexander Braun, 
Bronn, Johannes Miiller, Haeckel, Gegenbaur, Dohrn, 
KoUiker, De Bary, Hofmeister, Sachs, Goebel, and the 
histologists, we must admit that German morphologists 
rank high. 

3. EMBRYOLOGY 

Foundations. — Embryology, or the science of the de- 
velopment of the individual organism, was in Aristotle's 
thoughtSjbut he had practically no successors before Harvey 
(1578-1675), who discerned that every animal develops from 
an ovum, and that the formation of the body is gradual. But 
the founder of modern embryology was Caspar Friedrich 
Wolff (1733-1794), who showed that the ovum does not 
contain a preformed embryo, and that the organs may be 
seen being formed by gradual differentiation. This he 
called " epigenesis '' in contrast to the current conception 
of *' evolutio,*' which regarded development as the un- 
folding of a preformed miniature. 

The first to follow in Wolff's steps were two Russian 
investigators. Christian Pander (1794-1865) and Karl Ernst 
von Baer (1792-1876). To von Baer belongs the credit of 
beginning comparative embryology, of defining the mode of 
development as being from the general to the special, of 
discerning that individual development might throw light 
on relationships, of discovering the mammalian ovum, and 
much more besides. Even von Baer did not recognise the 



SCIENCE 101 

significance of the male cell or spermatozoon, which was 
made clear by von Siebold, KoUiker (1841), and others. In 
1843, Martin Barry, a medical student in Edinburgh, saw 
for the first time the union of sperm and ovum in a mammal 
— the rabbit. 

Maturation and Fertilisation. — The modern study 
of the maturation of the germ-cells and the subsequent 
fertilisation, matters of great moment in connection with the 
problems of heredity, has been largely prosecuted by Ger- 
man investigators. Among those who have done im- 
portant work, we may note Auerbach, E. van Beneden 
(Belgian), Butschli, Fol, De Bary, Strasburger, O. and R. 
Hertwig, Boveri, and Haecker. The remarkable recent 
work showing the possibility of artificially inducing par- 
thenogenetic development is especially associated with Yves 
Delage in Paris and Jacques Loeb in Chicago. Very note- 
worthy in quite another connection was the discovery by 
two Japanese botanists, that the pollen-grain of the Gingko 
liberates a mobile male element or spermatozoon, like that 
of ferns and other non-flowering plants. 

The fertilised ovum divides and redivides to form a ball 
or a disc of cells, and the next great step in development 
is the establishment of germ-layers (the outer epiblast and 
the inner hypoblast, between which a mesoblast may be 
interpolated). This subject of germ-layers has occupied a 
very large part of the attention of embryologists {e.g. of 
the brothers Hertwig), for it is an important step in de- 
velopment, and the evidence of fundamental structural re- 
semblance {homology) between similar structures in different 
types depends in part on their being traceable to a similar 
origin from the germ layers. An important step, now 
forgotten, was made in 1849 by Huxley, who collated 
the epiblast and hypoblast of embryos with the outer 
and inner cell layers in the tubular body of polyps, 
which AUman soon afterwards termed ectoderm and 
endoderm. 

One of the great " Hfts '' that Biology has received in 



102 GERMAN CULTURE 

Britain was due to Francis M. Balfour, who founded an 
embryological school in Cambridge, and by his own work 
and that of his students enabled this country to hold up 
its head as regards the study of development. He achieved 
much directly, as a teacher and a personality, but he also 
exerted great influence by the production of his Comparative 
Embryology, certainly a very remarkable book. It was a 
work of great erudition combined with critical insight, and 
it gave to embryology a synthetic presentation such as it 
had not previously received. We would ask those who have 
been in recent times so loyal to their country that they 
have cast historical accuracy to the winds, to take this 
book and to estimate from the authorities so carefully cited 
what a big hole would be made if the German contributions 
were removed. Von Baer is linked to Balfour by many 
who have done distinguished pieces of embryological work : 
Alex. Agassiz, Claus, Dohrn, Gegenbaur, Goette, Haeckel, 
His, KoUiker, Kowalewsky, Lacaze-Duthiers, Lankester, 
Leuckart, Loven, Metschnikoff, Johannes Miiller, Ratke, 
Remak, Sars, Sedgwick, Semper, Steenstrup, Van Beneden. 
Recapitulation Doctrine. — One embryological gener- 
alisation at least has passed into general thinking, and that, 
unfortunately, without the saving clauses which its scientific 
statement requires. We refer to the recapitulation doctrine, 
or biogenetic law that individual development tends to be 
a condensed recapitulation of steps in racial history. There 
are abbreviations and telescopings, there are special adapta- 
tions to the special conditions of present-day development, 
and there is a remarkable specificity in every embryo from 
start to finish, and there are other provisos to be kept in 
mind lest we take in too easy-going a fashion the idea of 
individual development recapitulating racial history. But 
there is a great truth in the conception that the living hand of 
the past is in the present. Especially in the development 
of particular organs (organogenesis) is the recapitulation 
of evolutionary stages to be seen. Now it is interesting 
that this is a peculiarly German idea. It is hinted at by 



SCIENCE 103 

Meckel in 1821, by Kielmeyer, Oken, and Goethe; a 

cautious form of it is given by von Baer ; Louis Agassiz, 
a non-evolutionist, states it in his Essay on Classsification 
(1859) '> Fritz Mliller was its enthusiastic exponent ; Haeckel 
its most skilful and convinced champion ; Herbert Spencer 
incorporated it in his system. 

Physiology of Development. — Embryology is in part 
concerned with describing stages in development, and the 
result is a cinematograph of the life-history. But it has a 
deeper task — of analysing out the various processes that are 
at work in the individual becoming or '' morphogenesis.'' 
The most strenuous attempt in this direction is certainly 
that of Wilhelm Roux, who started the Archiv fur Entwicke- 
lungsmechanik, and the contributors to this record of re- 
search represent all the nationalities. We do not wish to 
suggest that Roux was the first to inquire into the immediate 
conditions operative in development, remembering, for 
instance, the work of Wilhelm His {Unsere Korperform und 
das Problem ihrer Entstehung), Rauber's Formbildung und 
Formstorung (1880), and Camille Dareste's Teratogenic Ex- 
perimentale (Paris, 1877) ; but to Roux belongs the credit 
of focussing the problems, of making important contribu- 
tions towards their solution, and of setting many workers 
agoing. 

Experiment in Embryology. — Many investigators — e.g. 
Driesch, O. Hertwig, Born — have studied the behaviour of 
a developing ovum subjected to slight constraint between 
glass plates, and have shown the extraordinary capacity for 
re-adjustment that many early embryos possess. The 
effect of centrifuging developing eggs has been observed by 
O. Hertwig and others ; the effect of puncturing one or 
more of the early segmentation cells has been watched by 
Roux, O. Hertwig, T. H. Morgan, and others ; the results of 
shaking segmentation cells apart have been finely studied 
by Chun, Driesch, E. B. Wilson, and others; the influence 
of altered chemical and physical conditions has been best 
analysed by Curt Herbst ; the effect of radium rays on 



104 GERMAN CULTURE 

development has been studied by Oscar, Paula, Gunther, and 
Hertwig; the study of non-nucleated fragments of eggs 
which sometimes admit of fertilisation and development 
has led Boveri, Delage, Morgan, and others to very interest- 
ing results. Thus we see that in the relatively recent 
employment of experimental devices in embryological 
research German investigators have had a leading part. 

Regeneration. — For many years naturalists had been 
familiar with the regenerative capacity among animals — • 
the starfish regrowing a lost arm, the snail a lost horn, and 
the lizard a lost tail, and some, such as Reaumur, had 
almost discovered a law of its distribution. The first to do 
so clearly was, it seems, an Italian naturalist, Lessona, who 
noticed (1868) that the regenerative capacity tends to occur 
in those animals, and in those parts of animals, which in the 
natural conditions of their life are particularly liable to 
non-fatal injury. But the first biologist to see the signi- 
ficance and the fruitfulness of the study of regenerative 
processes, and to test the Darwinian theory in reference to 
it, was Weismann, who defended the thesis that '' the power 
of regeneration possessed by an animal or by a part of an 
animal is regulated by adaptation to the frequency of loss 
and to the extent of the damage caused by the loss.'' Now 
one cannot exactly say that the subject has been neglected 
in Britain, but we have very little to show (in part, no doubt, 
because of the anti-vivisection Acts) compared with France, 
Germany, Austria, America. The subject is one of great 
fruitfulness, with relations to the problems of development, 
of adaptation, of heredity, of sex, and even of surgery. Yet 
w^e stand very badly. The leading contributions are due to 
Barfurth, Bordage, Loeb, Michel, Miiller, T. H. Morgan, 
Przibram, Tornier, Werner, Wheeler, Wolff; and the best 
discussions of the problems are those of T. H. Morgan, 
Przibram, and Weismann. 

Conclusion. — While embryological investigation was 
well begun in Britain by Harvey, it cannot be said to have 
risen again to that level until we come to the brilliant work 



SCIENCE 105 

of F. M. Balfour and those whom he inspired. But there 
are at present only a few who sustain the tradition, and 
experimental embryology has still fewer representatives. 
It appears to us that the German succession from Wolff 
(1759) to Oscar Hertwig is the stronger — Meckel, Ratke, 
Hofmeister, Johannes Miiller, Goette, Dohrn, Roux, Driesch, 
Herbst. 



4. AETIOLOGY 

The Evolution Idea. — ^The Doctrine of Descent {Trans- 
formisme of the French, Abstammungslehre of the Germans) 
means that the present is the child of the past and the 
parent of the future. More concretely, it means that the 
plants and animals of the present day are the transformed 
descendants of ancestors on the whole somewhat simpler 
(except in cases of retrogression associated with parasitism 
and the like). The ancestors, in turn, are the lineal descen- 
dants of yet simpler forms, and so on backwards and back- 
wards till we approach the literally first organisms or 
" Protists,'' about which we unfortunately know nothing. 
It is plain that this is a formulation of the way in which the 
present-day state of things has come to be. It is a modal 
formulation. It is hardly a theory — ^it is the only scien- 
tific way of looking at things. If the present-day phase of 
the realm of organisms has not come about as an evolution, 
then we do not know the mode of its becoming. The 
evolution idea is accepted by almost all biologists — not as 
a solution of problems, so much as a clear statement of them. 
There has been a long process of organic transformation — 
one race succeeding another, born from within its prede- 
cessor — one type giving rise to another type by gradual 
fluctuation or by brusque mutation — a long drawn-out 
trial and error adventure — a series of creative experiments 
on the organism's part. 

Evolution of Evolution Idea. — ^The general idea of 
organic evolution has certainly been one of the most influ- 



106 GERMAN CULTURE 

ential contributions that science has made to man's mental 
furniture, and, although it was Charles Darwin who made 
people believe in it, many minds shared in its development. 
Thus Professor H. F. Osbom calls attention to the " very 
striking fact, that the basis of our modern methods of 
studying the Evolution problem was established not by the 
early naturaHsts nor by the speculative writers, but by the 
Philosophers/' He refers to Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, 
Hume, Kant (whose grandfather was from Scotland), 
Lessing, Herder, and Schelling. '' They alone were upon 
the main track of modem thought. It is evident that 
they were groping in the dark for a working theory of the 
Evolution of life, and it is remarkable that they clearly 
perceived from the outset that the point to which observa- 
tion should be directed was not the past, but the present 
mutabihty of species, and further, that this mutability was 
simply the variation of individuals on an extended scale.'' 

Coming down to the concrete evolutionists of chief im- 
portance who preceded Charles Darwin, we find in England 
Erasmus Darwin (1731--1802), in France Buffon (1707-1788), 
and Lamarck (1744-1829), and in Germany Treviranus 
(1776- 1837) and Goethe (1749-1832). Again, the historical 
facts seem to suggest that nationality has little to do with 
the development of fundamental ideas. 

Factors of Organic Evolution. — ^The pre-Darwinian 
evolutionists were not merely clear as to the general doc- 
trine of descent ; they made definite suggestions as to the 
problem which remains the subject of active inquiry — the 
factors of organic evolution. Thus Buffon thought that 
environmental peculiarities were directly productive of 
changes in organisms ; Erasmus Darwin maintained that 
wants stimulate exertions which produce transformation ; 
Lamarck specially emphasized the transforming effects of 
changes in function and habit which were induced by new 
needs ; Treviranus, whom Huxley ranked beside Lamarck, 
attached chief importance to the influence of a changeful 
environment both in modifying and in eliminating, and to 



SCIENCE 107 

an internal power of progressive adaptation ; Goethe recog- 
nised the moulding of form by function and by surround- 
ings, but was a firm believer in an inherent growth-force. 
There were others with something definite to say, such as 
Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844), who emphasized 
the direct modifying power of the changeful environment, 
and believed in brusque variations or mutations induced 
in the embryo by external influences ; the geographer von 
Buch (1773-1853), who recognised the importance of Isola- 
tion as a factor in the evolution of species — a suggestion 
developed by Wagner, Romanes, Gulick, and others. There 
was also Robert Chambers, whose line of thought was in 
part like Buffon's, in part like Goethe's. 

But all sink into relative unimportance when we come 
to Charles Darwin (1809--1882), who vindicated the evolu- 
tionist interpretation and applied it to man, discovered 
(along with Wallace) the theory of Natural Selection, showed 
that variation and heredity were problems amenable to 
scientific treatment, and made clear such fundamental 
biological concepts as the struggle for existence and the 
web of life. 

Haeckel. — Prominent among those who stood by 
Darwin was Ernst Haeckel of Jena, now in his eightieth 
year. His historical position is with Spencer and Huxley 
and Wallace, for he was a champion of Darwinism, in the 
wide sense, in days when it had to be fought for. Much 
more Lamarckian than Darwin ever was, he otherwise 
agreed with most of Darwin's positions and was an enthusi- 
astic supporter. He was distinctive in his systematisation 
of the evolutionist outlook into a philosophy which most 
professional philosophers regard as a naive reincarnation of 
the hylozoism of the early Ionic school, and in its applica- 
tion of the evolution idea to the whole range of biology. 
Apart from this instinctive ambition to present a synthesis, 
Haeckel's work has been marked by his emphasis on the 
Recapitulation Doctrine and by his keenness in tracing out 
pedigrees and designing genealogical trees. His writings 



108 GERMAN CULTURE 

have given many a fallaciously simple view of the problems 
of life, but this is partly due to careless reading, and to 
Haeckel's aggressive attacks on everything theological. It 
will be found that in reality HaeckeFs general position is 
that of pan-psychism, not of materialism. 

German Critics of Darwinism. — Many notable evolu- 
tionists in Germany (and elsewhere) have expressed their 
dissatisfaction with the central idea of Darwinism in the 
stricter sense, that the origin of new adaptations and new 
species can be described as due to the natural selection of 
fluctuating variations. One of the ablest of these critics 
was Carl von Nageli (strictly a Swiss, but for most of his 
life a German), who brought against Darwinism seven well- 
considered objections, and advocated a theory of definite 
variation or orthogenesis — that steps in racial evolution are 
the expressions of growth-like change in a particular direc- 
tion. Among those who have found evidence to support 
a belief in orthogenesis as an actuality (not necessarily 
excluding other modes) may be mentioned some distin- 
guished American zoologists — Cope, Hyatt, Whitman, and 
Osborn. In Germany Nageli's orthogenesis has found able 
supporters in Eimer, PfefFer, and Koken. 

Another notable critic, a botanist like Nageli, was 
Albert Wigand, who devoted three volumes (1874, 1876, 
1877) to exposing the unscientific character of the Dar- 
winian Theory, and his extreme position has found con- 
siderable support in Germany (and in France too). G. Wolff 
speaks of the "episode of Darwinism,'' and suggests that 
it is best forgotten ; another German critic speaks of " the 
death-bed of Darwinism," and another of "the softening 
of the brain of the Darwinians.'' But there are not many 
biologists of high standing willing to go the length of 
denying altogether the place of Natural Selection among 
the factors of evolution. 

The Struggle for Existence. — The thesis has been 
recently maintained that the prevalence of the *' Might is 
Right " doctrine in Germany may be correlated with a 



SCIENCE 109 

widespread conviction that Nature's gospel, through Dar- 
win, her prophet, is '* Each for himself, and extinction 
take the hindmost,'' the cosmic rule being that careers are 
open to talons, that contention is the vital force, and that 
the survivors are necessarily the fittest. There is reason 
to fear that this fatal misunderstanding is widespread, but 
it is not confined to Germany. And as to swallowing 
garbled Darwinian philosophy, we have just been pointing 
out that extreme criticism of Darwinism has been par- 
ticularly characteristic of Germany. It was one of the 
leading philosophical biologists of Germany who declared 
" Darwinism now belongs to history, like that other curi- 
osity {curiosum) of our century (this was in 1896), the 
Hegelian philosophy ; both are variations on the theme : 
how one manages to lead a whole generation by the nose." 
We have the profoundest respect for the author of this 
deliverance — ^which seems to us extremely unscientific — 
but we have quoted it to indicate the danger of labelling 
Germans as ultra-Darwinists. 

As the matter is of fundamental importance, let us 
pause in our historical survey to notice that Darwin made 
it quite clear, over and over again, that the struggle for exist- 
ence in which and by which nature sifts {i,e. organisms are 
discriminatively eliminated) includes very much more than 
internecine competition between fellows of the same kith 
and kin. He insists that the technical phrase is to be used 
*' in a large and metaphorical sense." It includes all the 
reactions, competitive and non-competitive, self-regarding 
and other-regarding, with teeth and claws or with wits and 
kindness, individual and social, against limitations, diffi- 
culties, and dangers. 

In another study ^ we have expounded a thesis, based on 
some study of nature and also based on some study of 
Darwin's works, that '* progress depends on much more 
than a squabble around the platter ; that the struggle for 
existence is much more than an internecine competition at 

* Darwinism and Human Life, Melrose, London, 1909. 



110 GERMAN CULTURE 

the margin of subsistence ; that it includes all the multi- 
tudinous efforts for self and others between the poles of 
love and hunger ; that it comprises all the endeavours of 
mate for mate, of parent for offspring, of kin for kin, as 
well as every detail of self-assertiveness ; that existence for 
many an animal means the well-being of a socially-bound 
or kin-bound organism in a social milieu ; that egoism is 
not satisfied imtil it becomes altruistic/' 

This is, of course, what Prof. Patrick Geddes has always 
taught ; and it is, we believe, what Darwin (instinctively 
perhaps, rather than explicitly) taught. It has been re- 
cognised by Spencer, Kropotkin, Henry Drummond, and 
other thinkers, and admirably expounded recently by 
Cresson. What we are concerned to maintain is that the 
Darwinian idea of the struggle for existence is by no means 
restricted to the competition of piglings in the mire, or of 
brown rat against black rat, but only finds truth when it 
includes the multitudinous ways in which living organisms 
assert themselves against limitations and difhiculties. A 
common view is that the essence of the struggle for exist- 
ence is the direct competition within a species — a wolf a 
wolf to other wolves, which is bad Natural History, as the 
Jungle Books might have convinced us ; or internecine 
war between allied species — brown rat always eliminating 
black rat — a diagrammatical instance with suspiciously few 
substantiated illustrations. Our thesis is that the struggle 
for existence is seen wherever living creatures press up 
against limiting conditions ; wherever living creatures, with 
their powers of growing and multiplying, thrusting and 
parrying, changing and being changed, do in any way 
say, '* We will live.'' The survivor in a plague-stricken 
family does not compete with his kin ; he parries a microbe. 
And so it is along a great stretch of the line, though the 
picture of '* nature red in tooth and claw " is also part of 
the truth. This broad and, we believe. Darwinian con- 
ception of the Struggle for Existence has been stated by 
few, but we find it more or less clearly here and there — eg. 



SCIENCE 111 

in the Handbook of Darwinism, by Prof. L. Plate, who 
succeeded Haeckel in the chair of Zoology in the University 
of Jena. 

Recent Advances in the Study of the Factors in 
Evolution. — ^The interesting question now arises, What 
are the most important or most promising new develop- 
ments in the study of the factors concerned in organic 
evolution, and with whom are they especially to be as- 
sociated ? 

First, and especially to be associated with Weismann, 
is the widespread abandonment of belief in the transmission 
of individually-acquired somatic modifications. An active 
scepticism is justified until we find convincing evidence 
of the transmission of these '* somatogenic modifications," 
which are directly due to pecularities in nurture and habit. 
They are important for the individual, they may be in- 
directly important for the race (Lloyd Morgan, Mark 
Baldwin, Osborn, Ward), but they do not form part of the 
raw material of progress. For that we must look to ger- 
minal or blastogenic variations. 

Second, and especially to be associated with the work 
of Bateson and De Vries, is the growing belief that dis- 
continuous variations or mutations are of more frequent 
occurrence than Darwin supposed. As is well known, 
Darwin was at one time inclined to attach much importance 
to these " single variations," as he called them, but was 
led away from this by his belief that they were rare and 
that they would be readily swamped by inter-crossing. 
Evidence is accumulating to show that they are not very 
rare, and that they are particularly transmissible. By a 
curious turn of inquiry, the doubt is rather about the 
transmissibility of the minute fluctuations (a little more or a 
little less) on which Darwin especially relied in his theory 
of the origin of new species by Natural Selection. 

Third, and especially to be associated with the name of 
Mendel, a Silesian abbot, is the modern conception of 
** unit characters," that the organism is, in part, at least, 



112 GERMAN CULTURE 

built up of definite factors or determinants which express 
themselves in particular characters, and are independently 
and intactly heritable, either present or absent in the 
offspring, but not blending with others so as to be lost. 
The peculiar Hapsburg lip, which has persisted in a stock 
for over four centuries ; or the peculiar condition of the eye, 
called night-blindness, which has persisted in a lineage 
for over two centuries ; or the state of the hands, known 
as brachydactyly, where the fingers are all thumbs (with 
two joints instead of three), which has persisted in a family 
for six generations, may be cited as satisfactorily proved 
" unit characters " in man. 

Fourth, and especially to be associated with the names 
of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, is the application of 
statistical methods to the study of the facts of variation, 
inheritance and selection. This is not so much a new idea 
as an old method applied to a new set of data; and the 
progress towards an exact science that Biology has made 
since Biometrics began furnishes eloquent evidence of the 
value of the mathematical organon. 

In more ways than we can mention the study of organic 
evolution, though still very young, has become more exact 
and experimental. It is no longer very useful for the mere 
theorisers to write books or pamphlets exposing the fallacies 
of Darwin or of Weismann — ^we must have measurements, 
experiments, and precise facts, not views or opinions. Per- 
haps it is unwise to use phrases like Experimental Zoology, 
as if that were a new division of the science, but it indicates 
a coming of age, when the experimental test is everywhere 
exacted. We do not share the view that all the wisdom 
is with the experimenters and none with the essayists (as we 
suppose even Spencer would be called), for there is need for 
synthetic attempts if only to show analysis where to put in 
its lever ; and there is a sense of perspective and proportion 
and consistency which requires to be cultivated as well as 
ingenuity in devising experiments and skilled patience in 
carrjdng them through. Thus we attach to Weismann's 



SCIENCE 118 

essays, for instance, much more importance than some of 
the modern experimenters are incHned to admit. They 
have directly prompted a quite extraordinary amount of 
recent concrete work, which has confirmed as well as cor- 
rected anticipations ; and we absolutely refuse to accept 
the view that clear and consistent thinking is not a form of 
research. 

Heredity. — ^The study of heredity is the study of the 
genetic relation between successive generations. That 
relation is sustained by germ-cells which are the vehicles of 
inheritance and unite in fertilisation. It follows that there 
could be no satisfactory science of heredity until it was 
clearly understood that the beginning of the individual Kfe 
is in all typical cases to be found in the fertilisation of an 
ovum or egg-cell by a spermatozoon or male element. One 
is apt to forget how relatively modern is the knowledge of 
that fundamental fact. Even von Baer (1835) was inclined 
to regard spermatozoa as microscopic parasites, and Sir 
Richard Owen included them in a article on " Entozoa '' 
(internal parasites) in Todd's CyclopcBdia of Anatomy and 
Physiology. Although Spallanzani had proved in 1786 that 
sperms were essential if ova were to develop, the failure to 
understand what fertilisation meant lasted till about 1840. 
R. Wagner emphasized the fact that spermatozoa were pre- 
sent in all mature males ; von Siebold demonstrated their 
presence in Invertebrates ; in 1841 Kolliker proved that they 
arose as cells in the male organs or testes ; in 1843 Martin 
Barry saw the union of spermatozoon and ovum in the 
rabbit ; in 1865 Schweigger-Seidel and La Valette St. 
George showed that the spermatozoon has a nucleus as other 
cells have. If we included more names in the history of 
the establishment of the simple conclusion that fertilisation 
is the intimate and orderly union of two cells, the impression 
would be the same — that the contributions made by German 
investigators are predominant. 

Similarly, as regards plants, it was Camerarius (1665- 
1721), a professor at Tiibingen, who first proved experimen- 

H 



114 GERMAN CULTURE 

tally (1691-1694), that seeds capable of germination cannot 
be formed without the co-operation of pollen. That ferti- 
lisation in plants means a mingling of two different sub- 
stances was clearly shown by Kcelreuter (1733-1806). Steps 
of some importance were taken by Andrew Knight, William 
Herbert, J. Gartner, K. F. Gartner, Robert Brown, and 
others, but it was not until 1846 that Amici demonstrated 
that the egg-cell within the embryo-sac of the ovule is stimu- 
lated to development by the advent of the end of the pollen- 
tube. This was at once corroborated by von Mohl and 
Hofmeisten And if we pass from flowering plant to 
Cryptogams and ask who first observed the actual union of 
male and female elements there, the answer is surely Pring- 
sheim and De Bary. In his fascinating history of Botany, 
Sachs gives all the details of the discovery of sexuaUty in 
flowering and flowerless plants, and in summing up a section 
says in his characteristically generous way : "In this case 
also it was reserved for Darwin's wonderful talent for com- 
bination to sum up the product of the investigations of a 
hundred years, and to blend Koelreuter's, Knight's, Herbert's 
and Gartner's results with Sprengel's theory of flowers into 
a living whole in such a manner that now all the physiological 
arrangements in the flower have become intelligible both in 
their relations to fertilisation, and in their dependence on 
the natural conditions under which pollination takes place.'' 
Three Main Lines of Investigation. — ^The study of 
heredity has been prosecuted along three main lines — (i) by 
the microscopical study of the germ-cells, their genesis, 
maturation, and fertilisation ; (2) by genetic experiments, 
e.g. in hybridisation and in-breeding ; and (3) by the statis- 
tical comparison of the hereditary qualities of successive 
generations. This may be taken as a test-case as regards 
the two questions before us : {a) whether nationality means 
much in the progress of science, and (b) whether the contri- 
butions made by the German investigators have been of 
great importance. It is a good case to take since the history 
is all recent — practically beginning with Darwin, who 



I 



SCIENCE 115 

showed that the problems were open to scientific treatment. 
We may give the names of some of the most important 
investigators on each of the three Hnes indicated above. 
The microscopical study of the germ-cells has been prose- 
cuted by investigators Uke van Beneden, Boveri, Delage, 
Driesch, Farmer, Gates, Guignard, Haecker, Herbst, O. and 
R. Hertwig, Loeb, T. H. Morgan, Roux, Strasburger, Weis- 
mann, E. B. Wilson. On this line in particular, the German 
contributions have been of great importance. 

Important genetic experiments have been made by 
Agar, Bateson, Baur, Biffen, Boveri, Castle, Correns, 
Cuenot, Darbishire, Davenport, De Vries, Doncaster, East, 
Ewart, Hurst, Jennings, Johanssen, Kammerer, Kellogg, 
Klebs, MacBride, MacDougal, T. H. Morgan, Punnett, 
Spillman, Tower, Toyama, Tschermak, Webber. In this 
line the British and American work seems to be most im- 
portant. Darwin and Mendel stand by themselves. 

Biometric studies of heredity are represented mainly by 
Gait on, Pearson, Pearl, Weldon, Heron, Johannsen, Yule. 
Quetelet (1796-1874) was the first to use statistical methods 
in the study of human faculties. The botanist F. Ludwig 
should also be mentioned. 

Acquired Characters or Modifications. — One of the 
most important changes in general thinking in regard to 
heredity is the fading away of the belief in the transmission 
of particular bodily modifications acquired by the individual 
as the direct result of peculiarities in function and environ- 
ment. The evidence of the transmission of these so-called 
" acquired characters '' is very unsatisfactory and uncon- 
vincing, and there are few biologists who believe in " modi- 
fication-inheritance " in the way in which it used to be 
believed in before the modern scepticism set in. Now if 
there is any one man responsible for this widespread and 
very important change of opinion, it is August Weismann 
(1834-1914). He focussed the scepticism, he subjected the 
evidence in favour of a belief in the transmission of modi- 
fications to destructive criticism, he made a few experi- 



116 GERMAN CULTURE 

ments and suggested more, and he kept the discussion going 
for a quarter of a century. We have given elsewhere a 
history of opinion on this question, and it is well known 
that Weismann's scepticism was not novel any more than 
Darwin's doctrine of descent was. The idea that indi- 
vidually-acquired modifications are not transmitted was 
suggested by Kant and Blumenbach, more clearly by James 
Cowles Prichard (1826), somewhat incidentally by His and 
Pfliiger. The most interesting prevision was Galton's, but 
he did not follow it up. In 1875 he stated his opinion 
that the current theory of the inheritance of characters 
acquired during the lifetime of the parents " includes much 
questionable evidence, usually difficult of verification. We 
might almost reserve our belief that the structural cells 
can react on the sexual elements at all, and we may be 
confident that at the most they do so in a very faint degree 
— in other words, that acquired modifications are barely, if 
at all, inherited in the correct sense of that word." This 
was pubUshed about eight years before the first of Weis- 
mann's famous essays on heredity, but it was to Weismann 
rather than to Galton that the change of expert opinion 
was due. 



5. MEDICINE 

All that can be done within our limits is to refer to a few 
of the contributions to medical science which have been 
made by German investigators. It seems to be near the 
truth to associate the beginning of scientific medicine in 
Germany with Johannes Miiller (1809-1875), that extra- 
ordinary genius who gave new life to everything he touched. 
He certainly had much to do with convincing his contempo- 
raries of the imperativeness of using experimental methods 
in medical investigation. In his interesting Apostles of 
Physiology, Professor Stirling mentions that Miiller had 
among his pupils Schwann, Henle, Briicke, Du Bois- 
Reymond, Virchow, Helmholtz, Claparede, Reichert, Lieber- 



SCIENCE 117 

kiihn, Remak, &c. It is usual to speak of J. L. Schonlein 
(1793-1864) as one of the pioneers of a scientific school — 
the so-called " natural history school " — of medicine. He 
is memorable for his prophetic discovery that the scalp 
disease called favus is due to a parasitic fungus. Another 
great pioneer was Rokitansky (1804-1878), of Vienna. We 
believe that the first clinical laboratory in the world was 
opened in Munich in 1885, by von Ziemssen (1829-1902). 

ViRCHOW. — The publication of Virchow's Cellular Patho- 
logy (in 1858) marked the influence of the Cell Theory on 
the scientific study of disease. For Virchow tracked disease 
downwards and inwards till he could describe many forms 
of it in terms of cells gone wrong. Morbid growths and 
destructive processes were analysed into anomalies of cell- 
multiplication and cell-metabolism. He had a clear view 
of pathology as the seamy side of physiology, and there- 
fore with its optimism, for disease is not something mys- 
teriously intruding, but in some cases, at least, a constitu- 
tional variation which misses the mark. Many diseases 
may be described as metabolic processes which have got 
out of place, out of proportion, and out of time. As 
Virchow (1821-1902) did not in those days (1858) know 
about microbes as producers of disease, he was at pains 
to show, as he said, that " diseased life produced no cells 
for which types and ancestors were not forthcoming in 
normal life,'' and it was in this connection that he coined 
his phrase, omnis cellula e cellula, every cell from another 
cell. Central in his work and teaching was the conception 
of the organism as a system of cells which are ever chang- 
ing and being changed, experimenting and suffering vio- 
lence. As Professor Greenfield put it : " It is the cell as 
the living active agent in the production of disease, and 
the arrest or perversion of its action by disease-producing 
causes, which have the highest place in his thoughts.'' 
Certainly Virchow was one who laid foundations. He 
estabHshed a school, e.g. Reinhardt, Traube (1818-1876), 
Cohnheim (1839-1884), and his influence penetrated the 



118 GERMAN CULTURE 

whole world of medicine. His contemporary, the physio- 
logist Ludwig (1816-1895), had also a far-reaching effect 
on medical science. His studies on the function of the 
ladney, on secretion, on vaso-motor nerv^es, &c., are famous, 
and he was the first to make an instnmient to record the 
beating of the heart. He worked and taught in Marburg, 
Ziirich, Vienna, and Leipzig. Professor Stirling wTites of 
him : " From each and all of these centres his numerous 
pupils pubUshed under his direction and guidance an 
amount of work the extent and originality of which is 
probably unsurpassed. His own papers are epoch-making, 
and he founded the largest school of physiologists of modem 
times. *' He should rank along wdth Claude Bernard, du 
Bois-Reymond, Briicke, Bonders, and Helmholtz. 

Applications of Physiology. — Some of the most strik- 
ing advances of modem medicine are the direct outcome of 
the advances in physiology. We have already referred to 
the far-reaching influence of the increasing knowledge of 
internal secretions (Claude Bernard, Brown-Sequard, Min- 
kowski, Pawlow, Bayliss and Starling, Abderhalden, and 
so on). Even in surgery the recognition of the potency of 
adrenalin by Schafer and Oliver, and its isolation by Taka- 
mine, have had important results. Most striking of all is 
the treatment of myxoedema with extract of the thyroid 
gland — a triumph of experimental medicine for which we 
have largely to thank Sir Victor Horsley and his pupil, Dr. 
Murray, in the first instance ; and Dr. Hector Mackenzie, 
and Dr. Howdtz in Copenhagen, in the second instance, for 
feeding methods. 

MiCROBic Nature of Many Diseases. — ^The idea that 
the intrusion of animalcules may cause disease is old, and 
historians have unearthed numerous guesses at truth which 
are interesting, though they are not to be misunderstood as 
anticipations of the great discovery, which must be especially 
associated with the nam.e of Pasteur. Thus F. G. J. Henle 
(1810-1885), a pupil of Johannes Miiller and contemporary 
with Schwann, should be remembered for his remarkable 



SCIENCE 119 

prevision (1840) that contagious diseases must be due to 
'* parasitical beings, which are among the lowUest, smallest, 
but at the same time most prolific, which are known/' 
Those who generalise the formula that it has been charac- 
teristic of German science to elaborate the discoveries of 
others should take into consideration the number of cases 
where the anticipation was first expressed in Germany. 

Among the anticipators of Pasteur and Lister and Koch, 
may be especially noted (see Macfie's Romance of Medicine 
for some very interesting facts) Agostino Bassi, an Italian 
physician, who \vrote on the '' muscardine " disease of silk- 
worms in 1835, recognised its parasitic nature, suggested 
that this was the case with various human diseases, and 
both preached and practised antiseptic and aseptic treat- 
ment. Dr. Macfie also tells of what another pioneer, Sem- 
melweiss, did in Vienna in lowering the enormous mortality 
from puerperal fever by antiseptic treatment. 

Cagniard Latour has the credit of making one of those 
simple and apparently not very momentous discoveries, 
which turn out to be revolutionary. In 1836 he showed that 
the yeast-ferment of beer consists of living cells '' acting on 
sugar through some effort of their vegetation.*' This led 
on to Pasteur's evidence that micro-organisms cause many 
fermentations, all manner of rottenness, and many diseases ; 
and this led on to the antiseptic methods of Lister and his 
proof of their success. 

The first microbe actually detected as the cause of a 
specific disease was the anthrax bacillus, whose terribly 
fatal role, causing splenic fever in man and his stock, was 
demonstrated by Davaine and Rayer in 1863, and it was in 
the previous year that Pasteur was led to his brusque con- 
clusion, " La generation spontanee est une chimere.'' If a 
disease be caused by microbes working harmfully in the 
body, and if a microbe always springs from another of the 
same kind, it follows that certain diseases may be pre- 
vented by keeping microbes out (as in Lister's antiseptic 
treatment of woimds), or may be successfully antagonised 



120 GERMAN CULTURE 

by introducing something which checkmates the intruders 
(as in Pasteur's vaccine treatment of anthrax discovered 
in 1881). 

In the Ust of those who have followed up the work of 
Pasteur there are many German discoverers of renown. 
Two of the most important events in the history of the 
modem world were due to Robert Koch — ^the complete 
isolation of the anthrax bacterium (observed by Davaine, 
Rayer, and PoUender, and much studied by Pasteur), and 
the discover}^ of the bacillus of tuberculosis in 1882. The 
latter ranks beside Laveran's demonstration of the malaria 
organism, and beside Schaudinn's discovery of the Spiro- 
chaet of syphilis (1905). For combating the last-named 
terrible disease, an effective mode of treatment (Salvarsan) 
has been discovered by Ehrlich. We may also note that 
Eberth discovered the bacillus of typhoid fever, Klebs and 
Lbffler that of diphtheria, Nicolaier that of tetanus, Bruce 
that of ^lalta fever. The discovery of the organism of 
Asiatic cholera was due to Koch. Very important also is 
Lbffler's discovery of filterable viruses. 

Adaptations against Disease. — The struggle for ex- 
istence continuing with intensity for millions of years has 
led to the adoption of a parasitic mode of Ufe by tens of 
thousands of organisms. They have evaded certain forms 
of the struggle by becoming dependent upon their hosts, 
which are no more to most of them than a cheese to its mites 
or a ship to its rats. In the majority of cases the old- 
established parasitisms are not of a ver^^ sinister character ; 
had this been so they would not have lasted. Making some 
notable exceptions, e.g. for the ichneumon-fly larvae, which 
develop inside caterpillars and destroy their hosts, we may 
say that most organisms are not greatly injured by their 
parasites. They have become constitutionally accustomed 
to them ; a modus vivendi has been evolved. But what is 
often fatal, causing epidemics of the most serious kind, is 
the intrusion of new parasites into hosts unaccustomed to 
them. That is what happens, for instance, when new terri- 



SCIENCE 121 

tory is exploited by man and his domestic animals and 
cultivated plants, or when by mischance the parasites are 
transported to territory where the organisms are unprepared 
for them. 

Since both of these contingencies are of frequent occur- 
rence, and since it is also likely that hitherto free-living 
organisms may be driven to adopt the parasitic evasion, it 
is of the utmost importance that there should be counter- 
active adaptations. This brief introduction has been 
necessary in order to make clear a few illustrations of the 
important researches that have been made in the study of 
adaptations against parasitic disease. We can only consider 
this from the point of view of the general biologist, but it 
seems to us perfectly clear that the great steps are quite 
irrespective of nationality. Thus we have Metschnikoff 
from Russia, Ehrlich from Germany, Almroth Wright from 
Ireland, Kitasato from Japan, von Behring from Germany, 
Bordet from France, and so on. Along with Ehrlich may 
be mentioned E. Fischer, and Brieger is memorable for his 
discovery of the toxins of some infections. 

Phagocytosis. — ^Metschnikoff showed that certain kinds 
of white blood corpuscles or other wandering amoeboid 
cells attack, engulf, and digest intrusive Bacteria and the 
like. To this bodyguard of devouring cells the name of 
phagocytes is given, and their work is called phagocytosis. 
It is illustrated in manifold ways in almost every kind of 
animal from sponge to man. This is, necessarily, the 
baldest statement of a great discovery, and all manner of 
emendations must be taken account of. Thus there are 
some kinds of Bacteria which the phagocytes in the blood 
— of man, let us say — cannot under ordinary conditions 
attack. Sir Almroth Wright discovered, however, that if 
the blood-serum of an animal immunised to such Bacteria 
be injected into the patient in question, the phagocytes are 
enabled to deal with the Bacteria. It seems that the 
Bacteria are rendered susceptible to attack by something 
introduced with the injected serum. Sir Almroth Wright 



122 GERMAN CULTURE 

called this substance opsonin, which means preparing the 
food. 

While it was Metschnikoff who focussed the doctrine of 
phagocytosis, there had been various approaches to it. 
Thus it is very interesting to find that as far back as 1858 
Ernst Haeckel, in one of his many anticipations, had called 
attention to the way in which the amoeboid cells of a 
mollusc (Tethys) engulfed the particles of indigo which he 
injected. In 1867 Cohnheim (1839-1884) discovered the 
remarkable fact that the white blood corpuscles could work 
their way through the walls of the blood-vessels. In his 
vivid Romance of Medicine Dr. Ronald Campbell Macfie 
refers to a number of investigations, in which German 
workers played an important part, leading on towards the 
doctrine of phagocytosis. "In 1877 Grawitz noticed that 
when a fungus which grows upon lily-of-the-valley was 
introduced into the blood of mammals, it was seized by the 
white blood-cells. In 1881 the idea of phagocytosis seemed 
rapidly to ripen. In that year Gaule, Roser, and Stern- 
berg all gave more or less precise expression to the notion." 
Great interest attaches to the studies of the botanist 
Pfeffer on chemotaxis or the attraction of cells to influences 
from a distance. 

According to Metschnikoff, the anti-bodies are produced 
by broken-down poisoned phagocytes, but there is another 
famous interpretation (not necessarily antagonistic), the 
side-chain theory of Ehrlich, according to which immunisa- 
tion means that the blood becomes loaded up with " side- 
chains " or free groups of molecules belonging to the proto- 
plasmic mixture, and that these unite in the blood with the 
poison molecules and, by satisfying their chemical valency, 
render them harmless. Here, too, should be noted another 
important contribution from a German laboratory, namely, 
the evidence adduced by Weigert that the production of 
anti-bodies is far in excess of the poison to be neutralised. 
One unit of diphtheria toxin is sufficient to produce half a 
million units of anti-body. Our references to such an 



I 



SCIENCE 128 

intricate question as immunity must be very superficial. 
But it will be admitted, we believe, by all, that for all 
time coming the name of Ehrhch will be honourably 
associated with the study of what is one of the most 
marvellous and practically important of vital adaptations. 
It matters relatively little whether Ehrlich's ingenious 
theory of the reaction between toxin and antitoxin be 
quite adequate or not. Along the lines he has so brilliantly 
illumined the solution lies. Dr. W. T. Councilman, a 
recognised authority, Professor of Pathology in Harvard 
University, writes in regard to EhrUch's theory: "Few 
hypotheses have been advanced in science which are more 
ingenious, in better accord with the facts, have had greater 
importance in enabling the student to grasp the intricacies 
of an obscure problem, and which have had an equal 
influence in stimulating research." 

It is usual to distinguish natural immunity from ac- 
quired immunity, and two kinds of the latter—-" active,*' 
through having had the disease, and "passive,'' through 
the introduction of weakened strains of the microbe (as in 
vaccination against smallpox), or of products of the life of 
these microbes (as in the case of diphtheria). Here we 
come to the names of Kitasato and von Behring, who made 
mankind their debtors by their discovery in 1890 of the 
counteractive or "anti-body" to the diphtheria parasite. 
This extremely dangerous parasite produces poisons in the 
body which tend to stop the action of the heart, and so 
forth, but they also provoke the cells of the body to secrete 
an antidote. Life depends on the ratio between poison and 
antidote. It has been found, however, that the antidote 
in man can be re-inforced by injecting prepared serum from 
a horse which had been inoculated with the diphtheria 
parasite. This has been one of the great life-saving dis- 
coveries of our time. 

Another important contributor to the investigation of 
immunity was Buchner, who showed that the virtue of the 
immunised blood is due to an albuminoid substance which 



124 GERMAN CULTURE 

he called " alexin.'* To this Bordet and others added the 
demonstration that the alexin was not bactericidal until a 
" sensibilising substance " in the blood has first made the 
Bacteria vulnerable. According to Ehrlich, the sensibil- 
ising substances or '' amboceptors '' or go-betweens, which 
are set free from poisoned cells, are able to bring the 
microbe and the alexin together, with the result that the 
microbe is neutralised. 

Similar to the anti-diphtheritic serum, which has both 
preventive and curative efficiency, is the anti-tetanus serum 
(von Behring and others), the anti-typhoid serum, the anti- 
plague serum, &c., and it goes without saying that the 
methods are being extended and improved persistently. 

The names of Bruce, Manson, and Ross stand out 
illustriously in connection with man's struggle against the 
micro-organisms which cause, and the insects or other 
creatures which disseminate, tropical diseases ; but it will 
probably be granted that from von Pettenkofer (1818- 
1901) onwards Germany has led in the department of 
Public Health and in experiments towards an increased 
biological control of life. 

It may be of interest to recall the awards of the Nobel 
Prizes in Medicine : 

1901. Von Behring 

1902. Ross (Br.). 

1903. Finsen (D.). 

1904. Pawlow (R.). 

1905. Koch. 

1906. Ramon y Cajal (Sp.). 

1907. Laveran (F.). 

1908. Ehrlich and Metschnikojff. 

1909. Kocher (Swz.). 

1910. Kossel. 

191 1. GuUstrand (Sw.). 

1912. Carrel (U.S.A.). 

1913. Richet (F.). 



SCIENCE 125 



B. CHEMISTRY 



Conservation of Matter. — In our brief survey of 
Chemistry we need not go farther back than 1777, when 
the French chemist Lavoisier (1743-1794) *' with the balance 
in his hand vindicated the universaUty of the principle of 
the conservation of matter/' He was probably the first 
to see clearly that " the total mass of the substances taking 
part in any chemical process remains constant." The state 
of the matter may altogether change, as when the barrel of 
gunpowder explodes, but the amount remains the same. 
Lavoisier showed that in the process of combustion, the 
burning substance unites with oxygen, and that although 
the end may be very different from the beginning, the 
quantity of matter remains constant. He also reached 
forward with genius to the idea that heat is the energy 
that results from the imperceptible movements of the 
molecules of a substance. But the advance which we 
particularly associate with the name of Lavoisier was the 
establishment of the fact of the conservation of matter, 
which was not only fundamental theoretically, but supplied 
a quantitative test by which the accuracy of research 
could be continually judged. 

Modern chemistry dates from the time when the burn- 
ing fire began to be in some measure intelligible, and if we 
associate that with one man it should be with Lavoisier. 
But we must hasten to say that he stood on the shoulders 
of other workers, such as Priestley, who discovered oxygen 
in 177 1, Cavendish, who showed that water is a combina- 
tion of hydrogen and oxygen in 1784, and Scheele, the 
Swede (Pomeranian), who also discovered oxygen in 1774. 
More than a century before, John Mayow had almost got 
at the truth that combustion means a union of something 
in the air with inflammable particles in the stuff that burns. 

The Atomic Theory. — It is to the Quaker chemist, 
John Dalton, that we owe the first clear statement of the 



T 



126 GERMAN CULTURE 

fundamental fact that substances, both simple and com- 
pound, always combine in definite proportions of their 
weights, and the architectural theory that substances are 
composed of minute distinct particles or atoms, which 
arrange themselves along with other atoms into more com- 
plex groups in chemical combinations. This notable con- 
ception, which '* at once changed chemistry from a quali- 
tative to a quantitative science " (Roscoe), had been in 
part suggested by the physicists — ^indeed by Newton him- 
self ; and even in chemistry there had been searchings after 
it — for instance, by J. B. Richter and by Proust. 

The general problem of the atomic view of nature is to 
form conceptions of material architecture which will serve 
for the chemical and physical formulation of changes that 
are observed to take place in things. A multitude of 
investigations, most of them too technical to admit of 
statement in a sketch like this, made for the development 
of Dalton's fertile idea. Sir Humphrey Davy (electro- 
chemistry), Gay-Lussac (law of volumes), Dulong and 
Petit (specific heat), Mitscherlich (isomorphism), and others 
made important contributions, and by the third decade of 
the nineteenth century the Swedish chemist Berzelius had 
made great progress with the determination of atomic 
weights. Soon, however, revision became imperative, and 
in this many great chemists, e.g. Liebig, Dumas, Stas, 
took part. In 1858 Cannizaro utilised specific heat data 
as a check to other methods of determining atomic weights, 
and various glimpses were got of regularities connecting the 
different numbers (Prout, Meinecke, Mendelejeff, Meyer). 

On another line — the study of gases — great advance 
was made. This, as usual, is a long story, from Boyle (1662) 
and Mariotte (1679) to Charles and Gay-Lussac, and so 
to Avogadro's law in 1811 — one of the foundation-stones 
of modern chemistry. Avogadro's hypothesis : *' Equal 
volumes of gases, equal numbers of particles '' was confirmed 
by Ampere in 1814, but neither won the attention of con- 
temporary workers. The work of Laurent in 1846, and the 



SCIENCE 127 

discovery of disassociation by St. Claire Deville in 1857 
were also important. But the kinetic theory of gases, 
which was needed to harmonise the laws of Boyle, Gay- 
Lussac, Avogadro, and others came from the physical, rather 
than from the chemical side. The early suggestions of 
Daniel Bernoulli (1738) and of Waterston, Graham's dis- 
covery of the law of diffusion, the work of Herepath, Joule, 
Kronig, Clausius, and Clerk Maxwell, are some of the steps 
in the long history of the kinetic theory of gases, one of the 
revolutionary concepts of modern science. According to 
this theory, a gas consists of innumerable particles moving 
with high velocity ; overflowing into any free space that is 
available, thus securing that there is the same average 
number in every unit of volume ; impinging on the contain- 
ing walls, if there are any, and thus causing pressure which 
increases with the number of molecules and the mass and 
velocity of each. 

The extension of the atomic conception to solids, in 
which the mutual displacement of the molecules is not easy, 
is in part wrapped up with the study of crystallisation begun 
by Steno the Dane in 1669, invigorated by the genius of 
Haiiy in 178 1, continued by many workers such as Weiss 
and von Lang, Klaproth (1798) and Mitscherlich, and so on 
to the beautiful work of Lehmann on fluid crystals. The 
extension of the idea to liquids must be especially associated 
with the epoch-making work of Van't Hoff — La Chimie dans 
rE space (1875) — which seeks to formulate a geometrical 
conception of the way in which atoms may be supposed to be 
placed in space. The founder of this " stereochemistry,'' 
to which WoUaston looked forward, was Pasteur, and 
notice should also be taken of the work of Kekuld (1829- 
1896), Wislicenus (1835-1902), and Le Bel. 

Liquefaction of Gases. — An interesting Hue of work 
in which Britain comes out well is concerned with the lique- 
faction of gases. About the beginning of the nineteenth 
century, Northmore and others liquefied sulphurous acid 
gas, but the real beginning may date from the work of 



128 GERMAN CULTURE 

Faraday and Davy in 1823. Among those who have con- 
tributed notably to the striking series of experiments may 
be mentioned — ^Thilorier (carbonic acid snow, in 1835), 
Andrews (definition of the critical point, in 1869), Pictet 
and Cailletet (liquefying oxygen in 1875-1877, &c.), Wrob- 
lewski and Olszewski (two Polish investigators who lique- 
fied nitrogen in 1883), and Dewar (Hquefying hydrogen in 
1898 in the laboratory of the Royal Institution, where 
Faraday won his first successes). 

Development of Organic Chemistry. — ^The latter half 
of the nineteenth century was marked by the rapid develop- 
ment of organic chemistry. Among the factors in this may 
be noted (i) the elaboration of more perfect methods of 
determining the chemical composition of organic substances 
(Gay-Lussac, Liebig, Wohler, Bunsen, Dumas, and many 
others) ; (2) the recognition, which may be associated with 
the name of Berzelius, that organic compounds could not 
be separated by any hard and fast line from inorganic com- 
pounds, but illustrated similar laws ; (3) the fascination of 
the methods of synthesis which give the chemist a creative 
power ; and by the opening up of practical applications, 
such as those of coal-tar products. 

We must not attempt to follow the history, but it is not 
difficult to understand that the development of organic 
chemistry on its theoretical side involved the specialisation 
of the atomic theory. Just as the study of gases led from 
the atom to the molecule, so the study of organic com- 
pounds led to theories of "radicals," ''types,'' "nuclei/' 
" equivalents,'' and " valencies," all of them attempts to 
reach conceptions of material architecture that would fit 
the facts. Just as it had been shown (Ampere, 1816) that 
the salts of ammonia can be conveniently studied by regard- 
ing them as salts of a compound element NH^, so Berzelius, 
Dumas, Wohler, Bunsen, Liebig, and others tried to bring 
organic compounds into line with inorganic compounds by 
supposing that they contained compound radicals, like 
cyanogen, which behave like elements. The idea of " sub- 



I 



SCIENCE 129 

stitution " worked out by Dumas (1840) is regarded by 
Roscoe as very important historically, being the germ of 
Williamson's researches on etherijBication and those of 
Wurtz and Hofmann on the compound ammonias — ^investi- 
gations which lie at the base of modern organic chemistry. 
The " radical '' theory was characteristically German, 
e.g. Kekul^ (1829-1896), Kolbe (1818-1884), Hofmann 
(1818-1892) ; the *' type " theory French, e.g. Laurent and 
Wurtz (1817-1884); the idea of ''valency," British, e.g. 
Frankland (1877) and Couper. The working out of the 
theory of " valency,'' i.e. of the capacity of the atom for 
combining with other atoms, is especially associated with 
Kekule, Frankland, and Kolbe. 

Liebig's impression of the state of chemistry in Britain 
in 1837 was not sanguine. In one of his letters to Wohler, 
quoted by Merz, he writes : ''I have traversed England, 
Ireland, and Scotland in all directions, have seen much that 
is astonishing, but have learned little : whence is scientific 
knowledge to come in England, as the teachers are so 
inferior ? Among older men, Thomson is still the best ; 
among younger men, Graham : modest and unassuming, 
he makes the most beautiful discoveries. Nevertheless, a 
splendid nation, &c." 

Synthetic Achievements. — Even after it became plain 
that the complex substances characteristic of plants and 
animals do not contain any peculiar elements, but are mostly 
combinations of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, 
it continued to be believed that these " organic substances " 
could not be produced apart from life. It was therefore a 
very important step when Wohler in 1828 effected the 
synthesis of urea — the characteristic waste-product of the 
higher animals. Starting from cyanic acid, which he had 
discovered in 1828, he found that lirea was formed upon 
the evaporation of a solution of its ammonium salt. His 
synthesis was not complete, since he started from cyanic 
acid, which would now be classed as an organic compound, 
and the same remark applies to Henry Hennell's synthesis 



130 GERMAN CULTURE 

(1826-1828) of alcohol from ethylene. But it may be said 
of both that they indicated the beginning of the end of l| 
" vital force " as a chemical factor, and the beginning of a 
long series of remarkable synthetic achievements, such as the 
artificial building up of indigo, formic acid, grape-sugar, sali-«l 
cylic acid. One of the most prominent workers on this line 
is Fischer. Indigo was synthesised in 1878 by Baeyer. -, 

Coal-Tar Colours. — From a lecture by Professor J. J. J I 
Stevenson, in 1897, we may quote a historical reference to 
the utilisation of coal-tar. " Sixty years ago an obscure 
German chemist obtained an oily liquid from coal-tar oil, 
which gave a beautiful tint with calcium chloride ; five 
years later, another separated a similar liquid from a deri- 
vation of coal-tar oil. Still later, Hofmann, then a student 
in Liebig's laboratory, investigated those substances and 
proved their identity with an oil obtained long before by 
Zinin from indigo, and apphed to them all Zinin's term, 
Anilin. The substance was curiously interesting, and Hof- 
mann worked out its reactions, discovering that with many 
materials it gives brilliant colours. The practical applica- 
tion of these discoveries was not long delayed, for Perkin 
made it in 1856. The usefulness of the dyes led to deeper 
studies of coal-tar products to which is due the discovery 
of such substances as antipyrin, phenacetin, ichthyol, and 
saccharin, which have proved so important in medicine. *' 
The industry started by Perkin's discovery passed from 
Britain to Germany, but the honours of scientific discovery 
were shared by both countries. The tradition is still main- 
tained in Germany by A. von Baeyer. 

The Periodic Law. — ^Many chemists have been attracted 
by the possibility of detecting serial relations among the 
chemical elements — Richter (1798), Prout (1815), Meinecke 
(1817), Dobereiner (1817), Pettenkofer (1850), and others. 
Very noteworthy was the work of Newlands and his Law 
of Octaves (1863-1864) and a paper by Odling in 1864 on 
the serial relations of the elements may also be referred to. 
Those who have gone carefully into the question have 



SCIENCE 131 

generally concluded that in i86g Lothar Meyer and D. 
Mendelejeff independently reached the same conclusion : 
that the properties of the elements are periodic functions 
of their atomic weights. Since then it has been shown that 
almost every well-defined property of the elements ap- 
pears as a periodic function of the atomic weights. In his 
arrangement of elements into groups and series, Mendelejeff 
was compelled to leave certain blanks, and it is a fine 
corroboration of his classification that some of the missing 
elements whose atomic weights and other properties he 
predicted have been discovered, e.g. Scandium by Nilson, 
Gallium by Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Germanium by Winkler. 
The transmutation of the atoms of Radium (isolated by 
Mme. Curie), brilUantly studied by Ramsay, Rutherford, 
Soddy, and others, has afforded further corroboration. 

Interlinking of Chemistry and Physics. — Whoever 
compares the lectures or the text-books of 1885 with those 
of 1915 cannot fail to be struck with a great change — the 
interpenetration of physical ideas. The new department 
of Physical Chemistry has developed with extraordinary 
vigour, and the whole venue is altered. One of the pioneers 
was Kopp ; one of the leaders, till he turned aside a few 
years ago to other pursuits, was certainly Wilhelm 
Ostwald. 

There is Thermo-chemistry, for instance, which measures 
the energy of chemical changes in terms of thermal units ; 
there is Photo-chemistry, which studies the effects of light 
on chemical processes ; and there is Electro-chemistry, whose 
foundation was laid by Faraday. Among the great con- 
tributions along this line may be noted those of Williamson 
(1851), Clausius (1857), F. Kohlrausch (1880), Arrhenius 
(1884), Planck, Willard Gibbs, Helmholtz, Jahn, van^t Hoff, 
Duhem, and Ostwald. Of great moment was the theory 
of ionisation suggested by Svante Arrhenius, who proved, 
in 1884, that definite and quantitative relations exist be- 
tween electrical and chemical properties. The nature of 
chemical affinity remains obscure, but a mode of measuring 



132 GERMAN CULTURE 

it has been attained by the development of electro-chemistry, 
and with this the name of Ostwald (1889) may be justly 
associated. It seems likely that when the history of 
chemistry is brought up to date, emphasis will be laid on 
the fundamental nature of the work of Willard Gibbs. 

Writing of the relatively young sub-science of physical 
chemistry, Merz says : " Early, and for the most part 
isolated, labourers were Kopp and Hess in Germany, Reg- 
nault and Berthelot in France, Julius Thomsen in Copen- 
hagen. They (with many younger men) can be considered 
as the founders of the modern science of physical chemistry, 
which has received an elaborate exposition in the great 
work of Professor Ostwald. This work is probably quite 
as epoch-making in the domain of chemistry as Thomson 
and Tait's Natural Philosophy has been in that of physics." 

Circulation of Matter. — One of the contributions that 
chemistry has made to everyone's world- picture is that of 
the circulation of matter. All things are in flux, but no 
particle of matter is ever lost or gained. One incorpora- 
tion succeeds another ; one incarnation another. We see 
elements passing from the inorganic world into the plant, 
and thence to become part and parcel of the animal, and 
thence, with the help of Bacteria, back to air and water 
and dust once more. It is thus that the world goes round, 
and the idea has been of great practical and theoretical 
importance. If we are to associate it with any particular 
name it should surely be with Justus Liebig (i 803-1 873). 
This illustrious German, himself a student under the 
French chemist Gay-Lussac, became the master of one of 
the greatest schools of chemistry, the initiator of chemical 
laboratories, a pioneer of modem organic chemistry, one 
of the prompters of chemical physiology, the founder of 
agricultural chemistry, and the discoverer of many im- 
portant practical applications. Along with Liebig's work 
we venture to associate the popular book of Moleschott, 
Kreislauf des Lebens, which expounds the idea of cyclical 
development, famiUar to readers of Huxley and Foster. 



J 



SCIENCE 133 

Merz mentions that Mohr's History of the Earth discusses 
the circulation of the different elements. 

Conclusion. — As chemistry is at once a very abstract 
and a very detailed science, the sketch we have ventured 
to give is necessarily difficult for the general reader, for 
whom alone it is intended. But what we have attempted, 
even if we have made some mistakes, is surely better than 
vague or dogmatic statements regarding the superiority of 
the contributions to chemical science which have been made 
by citizens of this or of that nation. We trust that the 
sketch illustrates how much chemistry owes to the contri- 
butions of German investigators, to men like Liebig, Wohler, 
Bunsen, Kekul6, Lothar Meyer, Ostwald. To seek to be- 
little this debt seems to us not only ingratitude but foolish- 
ness. We append a comparative table (see page 134). 

C. PHYSICS 

" To take an old but never worn-out metaphor, the physi- 
cist is examining the garment of Nature, learning of how 
many, or rather of how few, different threads it is woven, 
finding how each separate thread enters into the pattern, 
and seeking from the pattern woven in the past to know 
the pattern yet to come.'' So Professor J.J. Poynting spoke 
of the aim of physics. Another modern master, Professor 
G. F. Fitzgerald, has said : " The properties of matter and 
energy, of energy and ether, and of ether and matter, are 
the subjects of investigation in physical science.'' In the 
main, physics has to do with describing and formulating 
observed similarities of motion. 

The first of the foundation-stones of Physics was laid by 
Galileo (i 564-1 642), and the second by Newton (1642- 
1727), whose Principia was pubUshed in 1687. It will be 
noticed that Newton was born in the year of Galileo's 
death. 

Among those who mainly developed the science of 
mechanics may be mentioned : Galileo, Descartes, Newton. 



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134 GERMAN CULTURE 

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SCIENCE 135 

Borelli, Robert Hooke (1635-1703), with his vibratory theory 
of matter, Huygens, Euler (1707-1783), Lagrange. Merz 
calls attention to the importance of the French school of 
applied or technical mechanics, represented by men like 
Monge, the elder Carnot, Navier, and Poncelet. As he 
points out, we may distinguish various departments of 
"Mechanics'' — astronomical (Laplace, Poincare); physical 
(EngUsh mathematical physicists, Kirchhoff, Helmholtz, 
Hertz) ; geometrical (Poinsot, Charles, Ball) ; and technical 
(Watt, Poncelet, Rankine). 

Conservation of Energy. — One of the great scientific 
generaUsations which has become part of the intellectual 
framework of all educated men is the doctrine of the Con- 
servation of Energy, that " The total energy of any material 
system is a quantity which can neither be increased nor 
diminished by any action between the parts of the system, 
though it may be transformed into any of the forms of 
which energy is susceptible " (Clerk Maxwell). It has been 
called by Roscoe '' the greatest and most far-reaching 
scientific principle of modern times." There has been keen 
discussion over the merits of the various contributions which 
led to its being formulated, and some go back to Huygens 
and the BernouUis. It is especially associated with the 
names of Joule, Helmholtz, Thomson, Clausius, Mohr. 
Just as the doctrine of the conservation of matter is con- 
nected with the perfecting of the balance, so the doctrine 
of the conservation of energy is connected with the deter- 
mination of the mechanical equivalent of heat, notably 
with the experiments of Rumford (1753-1814) and Davy 
leading on to those of Joule. In 1843 Joule showed that 
so much work, under the same conditions, always corre- 
sponds to so much heat, and so much heat to so much work. 
In 1847 Helmholtz published his famous essay. Die 
Erhaltung der Kraft — the persistence of force — in which he 
sought to show that this great conclusion follows from 
Newton's third law of motion. 

To the doctrine of conservation must be added as a 



136 GERMAN CULTURE 

corollary the principle of the dissipation or degradation of 
energy, first clearly stated by Sir William Thomson (Lord 
Kelvin) in 1852. In Professor Tait's words, it means that 
" as every operation going on in nature involves a transfor- 
mation of energy, and every transformation involves a certain 
amount of degradation (degraded energy meaning energy 
less capable of being transformed than before), energy is 
becoming less and less transformable/' 

Heat as a Mode of Motion. — ^The doctrine of the 
conservation of energy is wrapped up with experiments on 
heat and its recognition as a mode of motion. The idea 
was older than Newton's Principia, but the proof of it was 
Joule's. In 1798 Count Rumford (an American) had 
almost proved this by his famous cannon-boring experi- 
ment at Munich, and in the following year Sir Humphrey 
Davy was close on the track. He devised a clockwork for 
rubbing two pieces of ice together in the vacuum of an 
air-pump, and observed that part of the ice was melted 
although the temperature of the receiver was kept below 
freezing-point. Other approaches were made by Seguin 
and Mayer, and most important of all was the work of 
Carnot (i 796-1 832), who introduced the two fruitful ideas 
of a cycle of operations and a reversible engine. But the 
actual achievement of convincing measurements was due, 
about 1843, to Colding of Copenhagen and Joule of Man- 
chester, whom Professor Tait speaks of as " the true modern 
originators and experimental demonstrators of the con- 
servation of energy in its generality." 

Among the investigators of heat may be mentioned : 
Black, Rumford, Cavendish, Davy, Laplace, Fourier, Carnot, 
Clapeyron, Mohr, Mayer, Liebig, Joule, Helmholtz, Colding, 
James Thomson, Clausius, William Thomson (Kelvin), Tait, 
Rankine, Balfour Stewart, Regnault. 

Kinetic Theory of Gases. — Dalton had pictured a 
gas as made up of particles flying about and diffusing in all 
directions, and Graham had shov/n that the relative rates of 
diffusion of two gases are inversely proportional to the 



I 



SCIENCE 137 

square roots of their densities. From such beginnings and 
from suggestions by D. BernouUi and Herepath was de- 
veloped the magnificent generalisation known as the kinetic 
theory of gases, which harmonised numerous facts regard- 
ing the behaviour of bodies in a gaseous state. The decisive 
step was probably that taken by Joule in 1851 when he 
calculated the mean translational velocity of the particles 
of a gas, showing that the molecules of hydrogen, for in- 
stance, strike the bounding surface at a rate far exceeding 
that of a cannon ball. To the development of the theory 
many contributed, notably Kronig, Clausius, Clerk Maxwell, 
Boltzmann, O. E. Meyer, Van der Waals. Here again 
German investigators did their full share. 

Theory of Light. — According to the old corpuscular 
or emission theory of light, a luminous body gives off minute 
elastic bodies, which travel at great speed in straight lines 
in all directions. This gave place to the undulatory theory 
of light, which was suggested by Descartes and Hooke, 
formulated by the genius of Huygens (1678), and established 
by Thomas Young (1773-1829), Fresnel, Arago, Joule, 
Foucault, and Fizeau — the central idea being that light 
consists of vibrations in an all-pervading elastic ether, with 
the vibrations at right angles to the direction of propa- 
gation. It will be noticed that Frenchmen played an 
important part in the development of this kind of investi- 
gation, and the tradition has been sustained in the work of 
Cornu, Becquerel, and the Curies. But a further step was 
due to the genius of Faraday and to Clerk Maxwell in his 
footsteps, who showed that light-radiation and electro- 
magnetic radiations are alike due to rhythmical disturbances 
in the ether — one of the most unifying ideas of modern 
science. The researches of Stokes are here of the first 
importance. Among others who contributed notably to 
the science of light and optics may be mentioned Huygens, 
Euler, Romer, Doppler, Bradley, Brewster, Biot, Arago, 
Mains (polarisation, 1810), Cauchy, Poisson, Foucault (1850, 
velocity in different media), Stokes, Bessel, Sellmeier. 



138 GERMAN CULTURE 

In his Rede Lecture on '* The Wave Theory of Light : Its 
Influence on Modern Physics/' Professor A. Cornu referred 
generously to the next great step in the history : '* But the 
abstract theories of natural phenomena are nothing without 
the control of experiment. The theory of Maxwell was 
submitted to proof, and the success surpassed all expecta- 
tion. ... A young German physicist, Heinrich Hertz 
(1857-1894), prematurely lost to science, starting from the 
beautiful analysis of oscillatory discharges by Helmholtz 
and Kelvin, so perfectly produced electric and electro- 
magnetic waves, that these waves possess all the properties 
of luminous waves ; the only distinguishing peculiarity 
being that their vibrations are less rapid than those of light. 
It follows that one can reproduce with electric discharges 
the most delicate experiments of modern optics — ^reflection, 
refraction, diffraction, polarisation, &c. ..." Thus it is 
in part to a German investigator, Hertz, that we owe 
our modern interpretation of light as an electrical pheno- 
menon. What he did was in the main to give experimental 
confirmation of the Faraday-Maxwell theory, and it 
should be noted that Oliver Lodge and G. F. Fitzgerald 
were about the same time within sight of the same dis- 
covery. This was, of course, the basis of Marconi's 
wireless telegraphy. 

Other Radiations. — ^To some extent it was by a 
logical argument from analogy that various workers were 
led to the discovery of other radiations — some of which 
have very remarkable properties. Different nationalities 
are well represented — France by the Uranium radiations 
discovered by Becquerel ; Germany by Rontgen rays ; 
Hungary by Lenard rays ; Britain by the work of Crookes. 

Electricity. — It was in the last quarter of the eigh- 
teenth century that Galvani called attention to the electrical 
changes occurring in the contracting muscles of the frog's 
leg, and in the last year of the century that his fellow- 
countryman, Volta, showed that electricity might be 
produced by the contact of two metals. But it is of the nine- 



SCIENCE 139 

teenth century that the study of electricity is characteristic. 
It was initiated by Oersted (1777-185 1) and Ampere ; its 
dynamical foundations were laid by the genius of Faraday ; 
it found mathematical formulation in the work of Kelvin ; 
it was further developed by Clerk Maxwell, Helmholtz, 
Fitzgerald, Lodge, J. J. Thomson, and many others. 
Parallel to some of Faraday's work on magneto-electricity 
and induction currents was the work of the American 
Joseph Henry (1799-1878). Among the many contribu- 
tions we must mention the work of Ohm (1789-1854), 
whose simple appliances can be seen in the Museum at 
Munich. He measured electric resistance and the like, 
following a line indicated by Cavendish in 1781, and sup- 
plied the basis, at least, for our whole system of electrical 
measurements. One thinks also of Weber, R. Kohlrausch, 
Fitzgerald, Pliicker (electric and magnetic properties of 
gases and crystals, from 1847), Lodge, Poynting, Heaviside, 
Boltzmann. 

Nature of Matter. — The old idea of matter as con- 
sisting of perfectly hard atoms with empty spaces between, 
has given place to something subtler. Boscovich and Fara- 
day replaced the perfectly hard atom by point-centres of 
repulsive and attractive forces, Kelvin by vortices in a 
perfect fluid ether, Larmor by loci of strain in the ether. 
Lodge by individualisations of the ether, and so on. " As 
we watch," Poynting said, " the weaving of the garment of 
Nature, we resolve it in imagination into threads of ether 
spangled over with beads of matter. We look still closer, 
and the beads of matter vanish ; they are mere knots and 
loops in the threads of ether." Among the other con- 
tributors to the theory of matter besides those mentioned, 
we should notice Maxwell, Cauchy, J. J. Thomson. Among 
those who have studied the constitution of matter and the 
theory of the ether may be mentioned — Kelvin, Tait, 
Larmor, Helmholtz, Lodge, Rankine, Neumann, Fitzgerald, 
Johnstone Stoney, Drude, McCuUagh, J. J. Thomson, 
Lorentz, Wiechert, Wien, Zeemann. 



140 



GERMAN CULTURE 



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SCIENCE 141 



D. MATHEMATICS 



Two notes already made must be emphasized here. The 
first is that the greatest names in the higher reaches of 
science may be quite unfamiUar to the man in the street 
or even to the general reader, unless some practical applica- 
tion or the like happens to have brought them into public 
notice. Thus, to take three names, beginning with the 
same letter, British, French, and German respectively — 
Green, Galois, and Gauss, they stand for mathematical 
achievements of the very highest order, but none of them 
can be said to be familiar, unless perhaps the last. The 
second note is this, that mathematical thought is in its 
quality so much by itself that the less outsiders say of it 
the better. A perusal of Merz's History and of various 
books like Poincare's Foundations of Science has led to the 
following comparative list (see page 142). 

E. ASTRONOMY 

Astronomy, which is usually ranked as the oldest of the 
concrete sciences, exhibits three main forms of activity : 
{a) observation and description, (6) analysis and generalisa- 
tion, and (c) deductive interpretation which looks forward 
in prophecy and backward in evolutionary history. There 
has been progress from {a) to {b) and from (b) to (c), but in- 
vestigation continues on each of the three lines. 

The various astronomical systems — Ptolemaic, Coper- 
nican, Kepplerian, Newtonian, &c. — express attempts at 
generalisation based on analysis. Copernicus (1473-1543), 
Keppler (1571-1630), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and 
Newton (1642-1727) laid the foundations. Newton's state- 
ment of the Gravitation Law in 1687 has been called the 
foundation of the astronomical view of nature, but it would 
be more accurate to go back to Galileo. No sketch of British 
astronomy could possibly leave out Newton, and in think- 



142 GERMAN CULTURE 



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SCIENCE 143 

ing of Germany we must include Keppler. Assistant for 
two years to Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer, he con- 
tinued his master's work and formulated the three great 
laws of the movements of the planets. 

A great part of astronomy has consisted in applying the 
gravitation-formula to the phenomena of the heavens — to 
such questions as the distance of the sun, the movements of 
the moon, the courses of the planets, and the paths of 
comets. On this line of investigation Germany has done 
her share. Thus Zach and Olbers corroborated Piazzi's 
discovery of Ceres (1801), and Olbers discovered Pallas in 
1802. J. E. Bode of Berlin formulated a law which aided 
at least in the discovery of other minor planets. The story 
has been often told how Adams and Leverrier predicted the 
position of Neptune, and how it was found according to 
instructions by Galle of Berlin and Challis of Cambridge 
in September, 1846. The kind of work Halley had done 
in predicting the return of " Halley's Comet " was paralleled 
in Germany by Olbers and Encke. 

Britain is wont to be proud of William Herschel (1738- 
1822), who extended Newtonian methods to the study of 
the stars and recognised the occurrence of vast develop- 
mental changes in the heavens, new systems being seen in 
process of formation while others are dying away. But 
William Herschel was a Hanoverian. Moreover, his work 
in Britain may be paralleled by that of Bessel at Konigsberg 
and by that of the Struves, father and son, at the Russian 
observatory of Pulkowa. William Herschel' s investiga- 
tions were splendidly continued in Britain and at the Cape 
by his son John F. W. Herschel (1792-1871). F. W. Bessel 
(1784-1846) is famous for much, notably for measuring for 
the first time the distance of a star. By the determination 
of annual parallax he estimated the distance of 61 Cygni 
in 1838, and analogous results were immediately after- 
wards published for a Centauri by Henderson (1839), and 
for Vega by Struve (1840). 

One of the pioneers in that part of astronomy which is 



144 GERMAN CULTURE 

concerned with the physics and chemistry of the heavenly 
bodies was Professor Alexander Wilson of Glasgow, a man 
of ingenious mind, who published, in 1774, an interesting 
study of the sun and its spots. But the blazer of the trail 
was William Herschel, and he was followed in his study of 
the sun by Sir John Herschel, Baily, Airy, Arago, Struve, 
and others. Nor can we forget the German amateur 
Heinrich Schwabe {d, 1875) who showed, about 1850, 
that there was a periodicity in the appearance of 
sun-spots. 

To name all those astronomers and physicists who have 
concerned themselves with the sun's heat would mean a 
long list. There were those who measured it — Sir John 
Herschel, Pouillet, Thomas Young, Langley, Janssen, Le 
Chatelier, and so on. There were those who discussed the 
problem of its maintenance — Mayer, Thomson and Tait, 
Tyndall, Helmholtz, and others. 

The investigation of the physical and chemical nature 
of the heavenly bodies may be said to have begun with 
Herschel, especially in his study of nebulae, but it soon 
attained to an unexpected development through the in- 
vention of spectrum analysis. 

Spectrum Analysis. — ^This method of obtaining from 
the spectra of sun and stars and comets a knowledge of 
their chemical composition was especially due to Kirchhoff 
(1824-1887) and Bunsen (1811-1899). The fundamental 
paper was published in i860, and in it Kirchhoff refers to 
the previous work of Fraunhofer (1787-1826), who dis- 
covered the " dark lines '' in the sun's spectrum, and on 
whose tomb there are the appropriate words '' Approximavit 
sidera.*' There were others besides Fraunhofer whose work 
Kirchhoff acknowledges as helping towards the new method 
which Bunsen and he discovered. He speaks of Sir David 
Brewster, Miller, and Foucault ; and the contributions of 
Stokes (1850) and Balfour Stewart were also of importance. 
But the method of spectrum analysis must be associated 
in particular with Kirchhoff and Bunsen. 



^1 



SCIENCE 145 

If we look into details, beginning with Newton's simple 
experiment of 1672, when he used a prism to split up a ray 
of light entering a dark room through a hole bored in the 
shutter, we find many contributions all tending towards 
spectrum analysis. Thomas Melvil, WoUaston, Simms, Sir 
John Herschel, Talbot, William Swan, Angstrom, and those 
already mentioned made their contributions, but our im- 
pression is that the credit for the method rests none the 
less with Kirchhoff and Bunsen. 

The method has yielded important results in the hands 
of Angstrom, Balfour Stewart, Miller, Lockyer, Rowland, 
and others, and with its extension to the stars the name of 
Sir William Huggins will always be most honourably associ- 
ated. From 1870 onwards the splendid work of Huggins 
was ably continued by Hermann Vogel at Potsdam. The 
record of what this method has accomplished has been 
called the scientific epic of the nineteenth century, and 
(to quote Sir William Huggins) it is indeed a triumph of 
man's mind '* to analyse the chemical nature of a far 
distant body by means of its light alone ; to be able to 
reason about its present state in relation to the past and 
future ; to measure within an English mile or less per 
second the otherwise invisible motion which it may have 
towards us or from us ; to do more, to make even that 
which is darkness light, and from vibrations which our 
organs of sight are powerless to perceive, to evolve a revela- 
tion in which we see mirrored some of the stages through 
which the stars may pass in the slow evolutional pro- 
gress. . . .'' 

Of exact observational astronomy with its patient cata- 
loguing and mapping, we cannot profitably say much in a 
sketch of this sort. We might speak of Bradley's Greenwich 
observations, the edition of these and extension of them by 
Bessel, the monumental MensurcB Micrometricce of F. G. W. 
Struve (1793-1864), the great Bonn Durchmusterung com- 
piled (1859-1862) under the supervision of Argelander, and 
so on down to the Harvard catalogue by Pickering, and 

K 



146 GERMAN CULTURE 

again the usual result would emerge that German workers 
have done their share. 

There was something of a new departure in the develop- 
ment of stellar photography, which has meant seeing the 
invisible, and in the improvement of photometric methods 
of estimating degrees of star brightness. What intensifying 
of observation is implied in the study of Mars by Lowell 
and others, and in the mappings of the moon by Lohrmann 
and Schmidt, Beer and Madler, Nasmyth and Carpenter, 
Neison and Secchi. And did not this careful scrutiny of 
the moon's face practically begin wth Schroter's Selenotopo- 
graphische Fragmente (1791-1802) ? 

Evolution Idea in Astronomy. — Though the concep- 
tion of organic evolution (with its struggle for existence, its 
variation and selection, its elimination and survival, and 
final replacement of one type by another) does not accurately 
apply to the heavens above, no one doubts that there has 
been a process of becoming. Perhaps development would be 
a fitter term by which to denote the establishment of solar 
systems and the differentiation of worlds. In any case, the 
evolutionary way of looking at things has come to stay in 
astronomy as in other sciences, and our question is : To 
whom are our thanks due ? 

It was in 1755 that Kant (1724-1804) pubUshed his 
General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, avowedly 
based on Newton's Principia, More important, however, 
was the Nebular Hypothesis of Laplace (1796). Though the 
details of this theory are no longer acceptable, the general 
idea remains that the solar system has taken form from 
a diffused mass something like the nebulae seen in the 
heavens. Among those who have contributed to the theory 
of the evolution of planetary systems we may note Helm- 
holtz, Kelvin, Clerk Maxwell, Faye, Sir Norman Lockyer, 
Sir George H. Darwin, and Professor Chamberlain of 
Chicago. Merz calls attention to the early speculations of 
Thomas Wright of Durham, which influenced Kant, of 
WiUiam Herschel, and of the mathematician J. H. Lambert. 



SCIENCE 147 



F. GEOLOGY 

There was little scientific geology before 1785, when 
James Hutton communicated to the Royal Society of 
Edinburgh the first outlines of his Theory of the Earth, 
But Sir Archibald Geikie in his Founders of Geology records 
the work of some pioneers. Jean fitienne Guettard (17 15- 
1786) was the first to make geological maps, to recognise 
the extinct volcanoes of Central France, and to see the 
value of organic remains as geological monuments. Nicholas 
Desmarest (1725-1815) studied the volcanic rocks of 
Auvergne. Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811) discovered the 
remains of mammoth and other extinct mammals in Siberia 
and inquired into the making of mountains. H. B. de 
Saussure (1740-1799), who seems to have been the first 
to adopt the terms geology and geologist, began the 
scientific attack on the Alps. Werner broke ground 
in the classification of minerals and was an influential 
teacher. We must not forget the prophetic idea of Leibniz's 
inquiries into the history of the earth, expressed in his 
ProtogcBU, posthumously published in 1749. 

Button's work was fundamental. He had the idea of 
the development of the earth, of the potency of little causes, 
long continuing, and he gave a deathblow to *' catastrophic " 
theories. He strikes a clear scientific note in a famous 
sentence : " No powers are to be employed that are not 
natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those 
of which we know the principle, and no extraordinary 
events to be alleged to explain a common appearance." 
His work was strengthened by that of his pupil John 
Playfair, but progress was hindered by a long drawn-out 
controversy between Hutton's followers — the Plutonists — 
who emphasized the importance of subterranean heat, and 
Werner's followers — the Neptunists — who were as sure that 
the agency of water was all important. Sir James Hall, in 
supporting Hutton, may be said to have made the first 



148 GERMAN CULTURE 

experiments in geology, for he fused basalt and chalk, and 
showed with layers of clay how the foldings of strata might 
arise. 

One of the great dates in the history of science is 1815, 
when William vSmith (1769-1839) published his Geological 
Map of England, embodying his momentous conclusion 
that the stratified rocks occur in definite sequence and that 
each well-marked group can be recognised and tracked by 
its characteristic fossils. *' No single discovery," says Sir 
Archibald Geikie, " has ever had a more momentous and 
far-reaching influence on the progress of a science than that 
law of organic succession which Smith established.'' 

Lyell (1797-1875) continued the work of Hutton and 
gave to what is called uniformitarian geology its finest and, 
it must be admitted, an extreme expression. He showed 
how agencies now in operation might account for the 
stratified rocks, but he refused to entertain the idea of 
evolution and severed his geology from cosmogony. 

To whom, then, is due the modern evolutionary geology 
which regards the earth as the long result of time, as the 
outcome of gradual development from a molten state, and 
also seeks to discover how the formative factors may have 
differed qualitatively and quantitatively from age to age ? 

It seems likely that various inquiries conspired to bring 
about the transition from Uniformitarian to Evolutionist 
Geology, such as the cosmological speculations of Kant and 
Laplace ; the physicists' study of the age of the Earth, e.g. 
Sir WiUiam Thomson (Lord Kelvin), 1862 ; the study of 
Ice Ages, from Louis Agassiz to James Geikie ; the in- 
fluence of palaeontology, which began to disclose in the 
successive series of fossils a progressive emergence of 
higher and higher forms. But one man may be named 
who made the transition impressive, Edouard Suess (1831- 
1914). He was bom in London but his father came from 
Saxony. Most of his life was spent in Austria. An indica- 
tion of his genius in reading the development of land-forms 
was given in 1875 in a little book on the Alps. His great 



SCIENCE 149 

work Der Antlitz der Erde was published in 1897. In the 
preface to the French translation of this geological master- 
piece, Marcel Bertrand writes : 

'* The creation of a science, like that of a world, de- 
mands more than a day ; but when our successors come 
to write the history of our science, they will say, I am 
persuaded, that the work of Suess marks the end of the 
first day, when light first shone/' This is exuberant praise, 
for there was much sound geology before Suess, but it is 
interesting. 

Although Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Buch, 
and some other Germans interested themselves in the 
study of volcanoes, glaciation, and the like, there do not 
seem to have been many important contributions except 
in one department, that of petrography, where the names 
of Zirkel and Rosenbusch stand out pre-eminently. They 
may be called the founders of modern petrography, and it 
is interesting to note that what started Zirkel was his 
acquaintance with H. C. Sorby of Sheffield, who had in 
1850 recognised the importance of microscopic sections of 
rocks. 

Geography. — As regards the young synoptic science of 
geography — ^which is a correlation of many sciences for a 
particular purpose — ^the historical fact seems unquestion- 
ably to be that Germany has led. One of the founders of 
scientific geography was Alexander von Humboldt (1769- 
1859), and that not merely through his explorations, or 
his method of representing the relief of a country by cross 
sections, or his invention of isotherms, but because he 
saw things always in their inter-relations. Dr. H. J. 
Mackinder writes: ''Humboldt's Essai politique sur la 
Nouvelle-Espagne, published in 1809, must take high rank 
among the efforts of the new geography as the first com- 
plete description of a land with the aid of the modern 
methods. Here, for the first time, we have an exhaustive 
attempt to relate causally relief, climate, vegetation, fauna, 
and the various human activities.'' For that is geography. 



150 GERifAN CULTURE 

When we think of the great geographers we recall Karl 
Hitter of Berlin (1779-1859), Ratzel, von Richthofen, Penck, 
Le Play, Reclus, de Lapparent, and Davis. 

Conclusion. — In the history of geological science it 
does not seem that many contributions of the first rank 
can be referred to German workers, except, indeed, in the 
field of petrography where their position is pre-eminent ; 
and except the work of Suess which is unsurpassed. In 
the development of geographical science German influence 
has been paramount till within recent years. 



SCIENCE IN GENERAL 

Foremost among German investigators whose influence 
was rather on natural knowledge as a whole than on any par- 
ticular science must be ranked Alexander von Humboldt 
(1769-1859). Geologist, botanist, physiologist, geographer, 
he kept before him for half a century the ideal, towards 
the realisation of which his Cosmos was devoted, of seeing 
Nature as a whole. He made a practical synthesis of the 
science of his time. His personality, his extensive travels, 
his style, his wide interests gave him enormous influence 
which he exerted liberally in the cause of education and 
enlightenment. He caused natural science to be appre- 
ciated in a new degree, and gained for it in Germany a 
dominance in thought and practical counsel which it has 
not even yet been granted in Britain. He infused into 
the incipient University system of Germany something of 
the French scientific spirit, and Merz reminds us that he 
was " the man who organised that ' scientific conspiracy of 
nations ' which is peculiar to our (nineteenth) century, and 
without which the study of geography, meteorology, astro- 
nomy, the phenomena of tides and magnetic disturbances — 
called by him magnetic storms — could not effectually be 
carried on." 

We cannot speak of the one brother without the other, 
and it is indeed difficult to say which was the greater. 



SCIENCE 151 

Wilhelm von Humboldt is especially remembered for his 
educational enlightenment which found expression in the 
foundation of the University of Berlin, in 1809 (at a time, 
it should be remembered, when the resources of Prussia 
had been war-strained to the uttermost). 



CONCLUSIONS 

Science owes much of its Development to German 
Investigators. — What we have been able to do in our 
historical survey is only to illustrate, but the general con- 
clusion seems secure, that it is as inaccurate as it is un- 
grateful to try to belittle the debt of science to German 
investigators. In some departments, as in Geology and 
Natural Philosophy, the British contributions have been of 
greater eminence ; in others, as in Mathematics and Optics, 
the palm is with France ; and so on ; but in many depart- 
ments Germany has contributed a truly splendid share. 
As we have said in our introductory notes, there are several 
different kinds of discoverers, and perhaps it is the case 
that Germany has not had many of those who by some 
flash of insight have made a whole subject new. But 
there have not been many of this type in any nationality. 
Another important consideration is that many of the investi- 
gators who come nearest genius are very careless of self- 
advertisement and move at altitudes which are inaccessible 
to the man in the street. How few in Britain or France 
know even the names of George Green and Evariste Galois ! 
There is a characteristic story of Mohr, who seems to have 
been a genius, who did not even know of the publication 
of his paper — containing, probably, the first formulation 
(1837) of the principle of the conservation of energy. An- 
other hardly known German genius was Pliicker, who 
studied the electric properties of gases and crystals. The 
supreme title must surely be given to Leibniz, Gauss, 
Goethe, Helmholtz, and Johannes Miiller. 

Within recent months the charge has been bandied 



152 GERMAN CULTURE 

about that German investigators get hold of the ideas of 
others and work them out, so that the credit passes from 
the originator to the elaborator. But this allegation re- 
quires to be scrutinised with care, and should not be allowed 
to pass into popular currency. A few cases of serious 
plagiarism in science are known, and they are not confined 
to Germany! Besides, one knows that similar ideas are 
often in the air about the same time, and that ''great 
minds think alike/' If an idea is lying like a non-germin- 
ating seed, some credit is due to the man who makes it 
develop, though he should, of course, be prompt to point 
out that the seed did not come from his tree. It shows 
the beginning of a dangerous arrogance to speak as if all 
the original and fertile ideas saw the light in Britain, 
France, and America, and as if German investigators were 
merely hodmen of prodigious industry. This is an unworthy 
travesty of the facts. It is easy to mention cases where 
British investigators have wisely taken a hint from new 
ideas and new methods arising elsewhere ; but, of course, 
it will be difficult to find cases where full credit has not 
been given to the originator. Thus one of Professor Bate- 
son's valuable contributions includes much of his own 
fundamentally-important work on inheritance under the 
title Mendel's Principles of Heredity, Professor Punnett 
incorporates some of his own work in a book with the title 
Mendelism, just as Wallace called one of his best books 
Darwinism. We know how Ferrier in his early work on 
cerebral localisation took a hint from the experiments of 
Fritsch and Hitzig. We knov/ that Young and Fresnel 
were almost equally great. We know that Frankland and 
Kolbe worked together. 

Probable Fallacy of Using the History of Science 
AS AN Index of National Qualities. — Modern civilised 
nations differ organically, that is to say, in their hereditary 
qualities of body and mind. But most of them are very 
heterogeneous, aggregates or integrates of racial groups 
which do not blend, even with intermarriage. Thus the 



SCIENCE 153 

Celtic strain in the Hebrides is perhaps as different from 
the East Anglian as French from German. And just as 
one countryside is all Tertiary and another mainly Primary, 
so the populations are here plainly Victorian and there as 
obviously Arthurian. 

Modern civilised nations differ traditionally ; and when 
Human Nature comes to be studied as scientifically as 
Animal Nature or as Inorganic Nature, it may be found 
possible to appraise this tradition-factor in relation to the 
constitutional differences. But we are far from this at 
present, and it is extremely difficult often to suggest why 
certain kinds of studies are prosecuted with zest in one 
country and with an effort in another. There is a tradition 
operative in such matters. 

But, thirdly, modern civilised nations differ environ- 
mentally — that is to say, in geographical position in the 
widest sense of the term. This means very great differ- 
ences in opportunities (seafaring, for instance) ; and every 
biologist is aware that whatever be the treasure of here- 
ditary capacity, the expression of this depends on the 
available liberating stimuli. We do not expect a develop- 
ment of metallurgy in a country with no mines. 

If there is truth in these three propositions, we must 
recognise the probable fallacy of using the history of science 
as an index of national or racial qualities. 

Scientific Ability not Correlated with Nation- 
ality. — ^This is an impression, not a statistical conclusion, 
but there are many facts behind it. Our foregoing survey — 
sketchy as it had to be — certainly suggests that each of the 
leading civilised nations has its fair share of scientific dis- 
coveries of first-rate importance. If one knew enough as 
to details of race — e.g. if one could put by themselves all of 
Jewish strain, or could trace the migrations of gifted stock, 
say, from North Italy into France, Germany, Switzerland, 
and Austria, one's impression might change. But neither 
for olden times nor for cur own can we find convincing 
evidence for correlating special fertility in scientific dis- 



154 GERMAN CULTURE 

covery with any nationality. The discovering spirit is 
individual. It means a particular alertness, fineness, fresh- 
ness, eagerness — ^born, not made. It is sacred and inestim- 
able, and it is a matter for lasting regret when it ends with 
its possessor and is not incorporated into the natural in- 
heritance of the race. 

Our impression that the rare spirit of the discoverer 
moveth where it listeth, no one being able to tell whence it 
cometh or whither it goeth, is shared by others who have 
interested themselves in the history of science. Thus, Sir 
Michael Foster writes : '' While we have been following the 
gradual enlightenment of the physiological world we have 
seen how the spot of light which was the centre of illumina- 
tion shifted from place to place, and shone now in one 
University, now in another. We have seen it bursting out 
brilliantly at Padua in Vesalius, less brightly in Fabricius ; 
it appeared meteor-like in Switzerland in Paracelsus ; then 
it moved to London and shone in Harvey. Anon it burst 
out in the northern countries in van Helmont at Brussels, 
in Stensen at Copenhagen. It flitted back to Italy, to 
Borelli in Pisa, to Malpighi in Bologna, and once more re- 
turned to the north to Sylvius in Leyden, and to others." 
If he had been writing of the nineteenth century, he would 
have mentioned centres of illumination in France and 
Germany. 

Nobel Prizes. — It may be of interest to take note of 
the Nobel awards in chemistry and physics. 

In Chemistry : 

1901. Van't Hoff (H.). 

1902. Fischer. 

1903. Arrhenius (Sw.). 

1904. Ramsay (Br.). 

1905. Baeyer. 

1906. Moissan (F.). 

1907. Buchner. 

1908. Rutherford (Br.). 



SCIENCE 155 

1909. Ostwald. 

1910. M. Curie (M. Sklodowsky, Pol.). 

1912. Grignard and Sabatier (F.). 

1913. Werner (Swiss). 

In Physics : 

1901. Rontgen. 

1902. Lorentz and Zeeman (H.). 

1903. Becquerel, P. Curie, M. Curie (F.). 

1904. Rayleigh (Br.). 

1905. Lenard (Hungarian). 

1906. J. J. Thomson (Br.). 

1907. Michelson (U.S.A.). 

1908. Lippmann (F.). 

1909. Marconi (It.) and F. Braun. 

1910. Van der Waals (H.). 

1911. Wien. 

1912. Dalen (Swiss). 

1913. Onnes (H.). 

Characteristics of German Science. — While we do 
not believe that the finer forms of scientific discovery are 
correlated with nationality, we recognise certain distinctive 
features in the scientific industry of different countries. 
Thus British work seems to us, not unnaturally, to be 
marked by its sanity, its sound perspective, its self-criticism, 
and its evidence of having been done for its own sake. 
Thus French work seems to us to be marked by its lucidity, 
its admirable presentation, its light touch, and its daring 
originality. Thus German investigators impress us with 
their productivity, their thoroughness, their learning, their 
methodic orderliness, their careful technique, and their 
convinced belief in the value of science as a whole and of 
their own contributions in particular. We distrust vague 
generalisations, but we have a strong impression that the 
reading public for concrete science is enormously greater in 
Germany than in Britain, and that there is a stronger faith 



156 GERMAN CULTURE 

(which we believe to be warranted) in what science can do 
for the amelioration of human life. It is also our impres- 
sion that the interest in the philosophical aspects of science 
which used to be characteristic of Germany has greatly 
waned in the last quarter of a century, and is probably not 
so strong now in Germany as it is in France, Italy, or even 
Britain. 

There has been during that period in all countries a 
general raising of the standard of laboratories, museums, 
demonstration facilities, and so on, in which America has 
played a prominent part, but we are strongly convinced that 
about 1885 a student who wished to specialise was able to 
get in Germany a pleasant place to work in, abundant 
material to work at, a high development of technical 
methods, remarkable library facilities, and the most generous 
expert counsel, and to get it more readily than anywhere 
else in the world. 

In one respect, however — ^in the matter of text-books 
for students — Germany was until recent years far behind 
France and Britain. Thus in regard to mathematical and 
physical science, Merz notes that while there were many 
great investigators in Germany before the middle of the 
nineteenth century — such as Euler (Swiss), Gauss, Jacobi 
(Jew), the greater part of the higher German school litera- 
ture in mathematics and physics w^as French or modelled 
on French ideas. " The only great popular authorities 
which did not belong to France were Berzelius and Graham 
in chemistry, and Euler in mathematics. As late as i860 
hardly any text-book existed in Germany on theoretical 
and mathematical portions of physics." Perhaps the first 
great one was Kirchhoff's Lectures on Mechanics (1877 — 
ten years after the first edition of *' Thomson and Tait ''). 
Soon afterwards came the clear and deep writings of Helm- 
holtz. Merz notes that before Helmholtz, the only Ger- 
man physicists who condescended to write popularly were 
Bessel, Humboldt, and Liebig. 

Industry. — Compared with French and British in- 






SCIENCE 157 

vestigators, the Germans are superior in industry or scien- 
tific productivity. The output of a man Uke Gauss, or 
Johannes Miiller, or KoUiker, is amazing. Perhaps there 
are several reasons for this characteristic, (i) More than in 
other coimtries it has been the tradition in Germany that 
the investigator should stick to his business, and should 
not dissipate his energies in civic or social affairs, in politics, 
or in over-much teaching. (2) Till 1875, at least, the men 
of science and the learned generally lived with a praise- 
worthy simplicity and often on small salaries. It was 
understood that the pursuit of anything but knowledge 
(and fame) had been given up from the start. Doubtless 
there were instances of keen rivalry in productivity with 
an eye to promotion, especially among " Privat-Dozenten,'' 
whose highest ambition it was to become " Professor,'' 
but of the majority the impression that strangers got was 
one of devotion. (3) To that may be added a tempera- 
mental quality, accentuated by habit, of strenuous per- 
sistence, now sinking into a certain stolidity, again rising 
into heroic patience, and on an average presenting that 
quality to which Darwin referred in himself when he said, 
'' It's dogged that does it." 

Thoroughness. — After one has read, say, ten thousand 
scientific papers coming from different nationalities, one 
begins to form an impression of distinctive features in each 
case. One of these impressions is of the thoroughness of 
German work. It is often excessively tedious — the long 
historical introduction, the record of personal observations, 
the critical discussion of the results of other investigators, 
the Allgemeine Betrachtungen and the Zusammenfassung ; 
and often, of course, it is but a mouse that the mountain 
brings forth ! But it is usually an irrefutable mouse that 
has come to stay. It is easy to find in other countries — e,g. 
France, Britain, or America — morphological papers, for 
instance, which are just as thorough as those of the approved 
German type in the sense that their results are well-sub- 
stantiated, but it is not easy to find many which are so 



158 GERMAN CULTURE 

meticulously detailed, which resolutely refuse to recognise 
any limit but that of the available analytic methods of the 
day. In many other nationalities the tendency is not to 
push detailed description beyond the limit of probable 
utility. It must be remembered also that the printing of 
numerous doctorial theses, which have to approximate (not 
unnaturally) to the type, swells the total annual production 
of the prolixities to which we have alluded. As one would 
expect, the papers of some of the masters become terser 
as their authors age ; but there are others who persist to 
the end in telling you everything. And the difficulty of 
criticising it is that in a way it is so excellent, for no one 
can tell what item of news may form the centre of a fresh 
crystallisation. Perhaps it is. best not to criticise at all, 
for there is nothing so precious as individuality, and the 
German style of biological paper is certainly not that of 
most other nations. 

Every scientific worker knows that for many years 
Germany supplied the world with scientific reports or 
records {Jahresberichte) of the progress of investigation. 
Though this thankless but absolutely necessary task 
has been in some measure diffused, the service done by 
German workers in this connection has been very great. 
We refer to such reports as Fortschritte der Physik and 
Annalen der Chemie, Merz, with his usual thoroughness, 
points out that the first records of this sort were pro- 
bably those which Delambre and Cuvier prepared at the 
request of Napoleon, and that the first periodical record 
was begun in 1821 by the great Swedish chemist Berzelius. 
He notes : " By far the most important work of reporting 
and summarising the results of scientific labour has been 
done by Germany.'' 

The Best Features of German Science. — In his 
appreciation of the scientific spirit in Germany in the 
nineteenth century, Merz lays emphasis on the following 
features : the number and efficiency of the universities, 
and the way in which these have devoted themselves to 



SCIENCE 159 

teaching research ; to their early and Hberal development 
of laboratories and technical equipment ; to the large 
number of investigators of the highest distinction who 
have worked apart from universities or institutes (men like 
Leibniz, Euler, Humboldt) ; to the breadth of view and to 
the idealistic temper which has been characteristic of 
German men of science. "The pursuit of truth and the 
acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, as an ennobling 
and worthy occupation, has, during a large portion of our 
century, been the life-work of professors and students alike 
in the German universities. In the biographies of many 
of them we meet with that self-denial and elevation of 
spirit which is the true characteristic of every unselfish 
human effort. In perusing these records of high aspira- 
tions, arising frequently amid disheartening surroundings, 
these stories of privations cheerfully endured, of devotion 
to an ideal cause, glowing with all the fervour of a religious 
duty, we gain a similar impression to that which contem- 
plation of the Classical period of Greek art or the early 
Renaissance produces on our mind. 

" Once, at least, has science, the pursuit of pure truth 
and knowledge, been able to raise a large portion of mankind 
out of the lower region of earthly existence into an ideal 
atmosphere, and to furnish an additional proof of the 
belief that there, and not here below, lies our true home. 
We may perhaps have to admit with regret that this phase 
is passing away under the influence of the utilitarian de- 
mands of the present day ; we may be forced to think that 
another — and, we trust, not a lower — ideal is held up 
before our eyes for this and the coming age. But no really 
unselfish effort can perish, and whatever the duty of the 
future may be, it will have to count among the greatest 
bequests of the immediate past that high and broad ideal 
of science which the life of the German universities has 
traced in clear and indestructible outlines." 

This is nobly said by one who has the admiration and 
esteem of all interested in the history of science and philo- 



160 GERMAN CULTURE 

sophy, whose erudition, fair-mindedness, and grasp of 
essentials cannot fail to win the profound respect of all 
readers of his History of European Thought in the Nineteenth 
Century. With what Dr. Merz says, the impressions based 
on our own experience of German universities and German 
investigators are in general agreement, and we adhere to 
them in spite of all that has happened. For we cannot 
allow what has been done to-day to affect our judgment 
of scientific achievements in the past. 



IV 
GERMAN LITERATURE 

By JOHN LEES, M.A,, D.Litt. 
Lecturer on German in the University of Aberdeen 

Classical German literature means, in the wide sense of 
the word, the century of Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller. 
This is the *' great '* age, and the first thing that surprises 
the student of German culture is that it came so late. 
Long after Shakespeare and Milton in England and Corneille 
and Moliere in France were dead, there was still no writer 
of universal interest in Germany. Martin Luther is the 
only figure in the sixteenth century, and his work was to 
a greater extent religious and political than literary, while 
in the seventeenth there is none among the many, as 
Opitz, Gerhardt, Gryphius, or Grimmelshausen, who rises 
above mediocrity. These two centuries are, from the inter- 
national point of view, a blank. In the one the Reforma- 
tion seems to have absorbed every interest, in the other 
the Thirty Years* War shattered the whole fabric of culture, 
material as well as spiritual. The question inevitably 
presents itself, Would Germany but for these two up- 
heavals have reached its majority earlier, or must we seek 
the root of the matter in a certain lack of originality, an 
inabiUty to start off till other literatures had shown the 
way ? On the one hand, we must remember that German 
letters do owe a very great deal to France and England, 
particularly in the eighteenth century, but, on the other, 
one might point to those charming folk-songs, composed 
and transmitted orally in the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries, which bespeak a native gift for lyrical com- 
position. Just a century before, also, under the stimulus 
of French chivalry, the knights and wandering singers of 

Southern Germany had produced a literature which re- 

1(51 L 



162 GERMAN CULTURE 

vealed, in the Nibelungenlied, Parzival, and in the lyrics 
of Walther von der Vogelweide, profundity, taste, and 
originality. The Nibelungenlied is by no means a new 
Iliad. The texts which we possess are swelled by inter- 
polations, and many absolutely essential portions are 
inferior in imagination and versification. But the con- 
ception as a whole is magnificent. Mythology, history, 
and mediaeval chivalry are wonderfully blended. It is, 
indeed, " the crown of the popular poetry of the Middle 
Ages," but, like everything else belonging to that time, it 
passed into oblivion during the unliterary ages of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries. The new conditions had 
caused a violent interruption of the natural development, 
and for that reason the evolution of German literature is 
very broken and unsteady. 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century all the 
critical foundations had to be laid anew. As one would 
expect, the first sixty years are marked by feverish eclecti- 
cism. The French classical drama and Court poetry, the 
works of La Fontaine, Voltaire, and Rousseau were exploited 
as models, while an even stronger influence, and one more 
akin to the German mind, was exercised by English writers 
such as Defoe, Pope, Thomson, Milton, Richardson, Shake- 
speare, by Percy's Ballads and Macpherson's Ossian, Such 
a glut of miscellaneous fare would probably have been 
distasteful, if it had not actually proved fatal, to any 
other people, but Germany assimilated it rapidly. Imitation 
led to critical discussion, and the seeds of criticism seem 
to have fallen on a more fruitful soil than they usually 
do, for from 1770 onwards literature took a magnificent 
upward swing. The scholarly, clear-sighted Lessing — almost 
too clear-seeing, as Novalis said — ^the impetuous idealist 
Schiller, and Goethe, one of the four or five great poets of 
the world, are the names that stand out pre-eminent. 
Round them are grouped men like Herder, Wieland, 
Biirger, Holderlin, Jean Paul, while we must not forget 
the indispensable pioneers, critics like Gottsched, Bodmer, 



LITERATURE 168 

and Breitinger, who were short-sighted enough, but did good 
work in their time, Klopstock, and lesser talents like 
Gellert, Mendelssohn, and Winckelmann, each of whom added 
his stone to the stately edifice of German classical art. 

A. THE CLASSICAL PERIOD 

The year 1748, which saw the appearance of the first 
three cantos of F. G. Klopstock's Messias, is the starting- 
point in the upward movement. This was at once received 
as great poetry, and it decided the main question at issue 
between Gottsched and the Swiss as to the justification 
and the scope of imagination in literature. Compared with 
Milton's Paradise Lost, Klopstock's epic is vague and dull. 
But it was so grandiose an effort for its time that it took 
men by surprise. The serious and sublime view which 
Klopstock took of the poet's calling was something as 
valuable as it was new. In his numerous odes, also, he 
has the merits of the pioneer who introduced new measures 
and tried new themes. Of his contemporary Wieland little 
need be said. His romances in verse and prose are now 
chiefly found on pages yellow with age. By their imitation 
of French lightness and grace they won the ear of the 
aristocracy, which otherwise took little interest in German 
literature. Wieland rendered a greater service to the cause 
of letters by translating between 1762 and 1766 twenty-two 
of Shakespeare's plays. Of his original works the only one 
that is still read is the romantic epic Oberon, which Goethe 
greeted in 1780 in somewhat extravagant terms as '* a master- 
piece of poetical art." 

G. E. Lessing is by far the most vital of these mid- 
century writers. Authorities like Saintsbury do not take 
an extravagantly high view of his criticism from an inter- 
national point of view, but to Germany at that time Lessing 
rendered invaluable services. He was frequently unfair to 
the French drama, and his views on lyric poetry, like his own 
attempts in that line, are very poor indeed. On the other 



164 GERMAN CULTURE 

hand, he wrote well on the Fable and the Epigram, while 
his Laokoon, which sought to define the essential differences 
between poetry and painting, put an end to the dreary de- 
scriptive style so favoured before his time, and emphasized 
the need of action in poetry. In the dramatic sphere he 
cast off the fetters of the Unities, and while his views on 
tragedy cannot be regarded as adequate to-day, he never- 
theless supplied his successors with valuable hints on choice 
and treatment of subject, portrayal of character, and the 
aim and meaning of drama. Of his own plays Minna von 
Barnhelm is the best. It is good comedy, pithily written. 
Though it deals with the Seven Years' War, it is still as 
interesting as it was when it appeared. Lessing knew his 
Prussians and his Saxons well, and as secretary to General 
Tauentzien he could draw his military types from direct 
observation. Emilia Galotti is too much a product of the 
intellect to be good tragedy, apart altogether from the 
aversion which the Virginia motive now inspires. His last 
play, Nathan the Wise, he called a " dramatic poem," feeling, 
no doubt, that it would not stand the test of stage represen- 
tation. It formed the culmination of Lessing's polemical 
work in theology, and its dramatic form was, to begin with, 
merely a mask. The plot is improbable and insignificant : 
it is only the connecting thread for scenes in which the 
three great religions are shown in contact at the time of 
the Crusades. The Leitmotiv of toleration is kept well to 
the fore and pressed home by the incorporated story of the 
three rings from Boccaccio. It is well done, for, despite the 
dramatic weaknesses and the relatively poor verses, which 
he somewhat vainly sought to justify, the work is valuable 
for its wisdom and humour. It is true culture and a pleas- 
ing testimony to the broad-minded, earnest, and deeply 
religious character of its author. 

J. G. Herder was, like Lessing, in the first place a stimu- 
lator of German literature, and in the second, even more 
than Lessing, a contributor to European thought. No 
service could be greater than that which he rendered Goethe 



LITERATURE 165 

in 1770, by opening his eyes to the poetical qualities of 
Homer and Shakespeare, the treasures contained in folk- 
poetry, and the merits of Ossian. His critical writings had 
great influence upon that restless, ambitious and unbalanced 
period known as the Sturm und Drang. This movement, 
influenced also by Rousseau, was a reaction against the 
intellectuality of Lessing and his fellow *' Aufklarer/' It 
asserted the rights of feeling, imagination, and untrammelled 
genius. Revolutionaries like Prometheus, Faust, Gotz, 
Karl Moor, were the favourite heroes ; writers showed a 
preference for pathetic or mysterious subjects like Biirger's 
Lenore or Goethe's Erlking, and in this as well as in its form- 
lessness the " Storm and Stress " proved itself the parent of 
Romanticism. Herder's collection of Volkslieder (1778- 
1779), containing specimens of the folk-poetry of various 
peoples, particularly of England and Scotland, finally estab- 
lished the importance of the folk-song in Germany. Of his 
own poetical compositions none is important except the 
Cid, in which he translated and unified the ballads which 
celebrated the Cid Campeador. Apart from poetry. Herder 
deserves great praise for his Ideas on the Philosophy of 
the History of Mankind (1784-1791). There he regarded 
history as a progress through culture towards an ideal 
humanity. He not only emphasized the fact of evolution 
in history, but also studied its factors and pointed out 
the essential importance of civilisation as opposed to mere 
lists of battles and ascensions of thrones. He is thus the 
first " Kulturhistoriker " and the founder of modern his- 
torical research. 

Contemporaneous with the Sturm und Drang was 
another literary school known as the Hain or *' Grove." 
They desired to continue the high-souled, patriotic ten- 
dencies of Klopstock, while the gay humour of Wieland was 
particularly obnoxious to them. There was a good deal of 
noisy rodomontade in their propaganda, and not much of 
their work deserves mention. J. H. Voss' translations of 
the Odyssey and the Iliad are still the best in German, while 



166 GERMAN CULTURE 

his idyll Luise was the forerunner of Hermann and Dorothea, 
Ludwig Holty and Matthias Claudius contributed a few 
songs to the German lyric, while G. A. Burger, who owed 
more to Herder than to the " Hain,'' is the creator of the 
modern German ballad. In pieces like The Kaiser and the 
Abbot his debt to English influence is very great, but in 
others, such as his great achievement Lenore, all the merits 
of construction, imagination, and expressive language are 
his own. Lenore and The Wild Huntsman were admired 
and translated by Sir Walter Scott. Burger's later ballads 
and his lyrical poetry suffered from the poet's unstable 
temperament and want of idealism, but they did not merit 
the harsh criticism which Schiller passed on them in 1791. 

A strong classical movement began also to make itself 
felt about 1780. This was not absolutely new. Horace, 
TibuUus, Propertius, and Anacreon had influenced the early 
lyric of the eighteenth century, and the classical drama had 
come down in an impure form through the French. Lessing's 
critical views, again, were based on a sound knowledge of 
the classics. Now, however, it was a question not of this 
or that classical form, but of ancient art as a whole, and the 
profoundest insight into this was shown by J. J. Winckel- 
mann, who in his Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works 
in Painting and Sculpture, had defined the essence of Greek 
art as " a noble simplicity and a calm grandeur.'' This 
winged word, " edle Einfalt und stille Grosse " exercised a 
far-reaching influence upon Goethe and Schiller, after the 
' ' Storm and Stress * ' had spent itself. Winckelmann had done 
valuable excavation work in Italy, and it was largely due 
to him that Rome became, from 1770 onwards, the Mecca 
of art for the civilised world. His chief work was the 
History of the Art of Antiquity (1764). Many of the views 
here expressed are no longer adequate. It has been pointed 
out, too, that Winckelmann was singularly blind to the 
beauty of Renaissance art. He was a characteristically 
German Schwdrmer, devoted to one object. His in- 
terest in the older art completely absorbed all his energy. 



LITERATURE 167 

But his work is worth remembering, because it was at that 
time the key to new discoveries in art and to new ideals in 
creative work. 

In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the great 
ideas and movements of the century are reflected as in a 
mirror. From boyhood he possessed that receptivity which 
is the best gift of the poet or the scientist. But he had also 
brilliant gifts of intellect, a strong will, and the lofty impulse 
to carve out a personal philosophy of his own. His Leipzig 
work is imitative in content and form. But the French 
manner fell from him when, in 1770, new possibilities 
opened up before him, as revealed in the grandeur of 
Gothic architecture, the naturalness of the old German and 
English ballads and folk-songs, the majesty of Homer, the 
wonderful world that Dodd's Beauties of Shakespeare pre- 
sented to him, the enthusiastic nature-love of Rousseau, 
the vague mystery and charm of Ossian. Life, too, was 
kind to this handsome youth, it gave him friendship and 
passionate love, it put counsellors by his side like Herder 
and Merck, who guided his steps with skill and candour. 
From 1770 onwards Goethe shows the highest gifts of 
genius, not yet in rounded form, for the *' Storm and Stress " 
formlessness holds him in its spell, but the germs of great 
work are there, in the Sesenheim songs pregnant with 
passion and adoration of nature, in the overwrought senti- 
mentalism of The Sufferings of Young Werther, or the 
nonchalant structure but picturesque detail of Gotz von 
Berlichingen. Werther was the first German novel of 
world-wide reputation. Its musical prose, the careful work- 
manship in weaving the web of the plot, the absolute neces- 
sity of the tragic close, and the personal interest of the tale 
still exercise their spell. In that sentimental age the effect 
was electrical, and no later book of Goethe's received such 
a welcome. Of the pre-Weimarian work of Goethe nothing 
approaches the Urfaust, that unpublished manuscript which 
had been written out by Fraulein von Gochhausen and was 
discovered by Erich Schmidt in 1887. It contains the 



168 GERMAN CULTURE 

conception of Faust as the restless, unhappy, ceaseless 
striver, dissatisfied with verbal learning, seeking to fathom 
the real secret of things human and divine, and devoting 
himself, alas, to magic as a last resource. Here, too, is 
Gretchen, that so simply and yet so consummately-drawn 
picture of the deceived and ruined girl, one of the finest 
conceptions in German literature. But many things were 
still unrevealed to the young poet — how Faust's idealism 
was to lead to sin and suffering, or, in dramatic terms, 
how he was to be introduced to Mephistopheles, what the 
nature of their bargain was to be, and to what end it would 
lead. The old Faust books, the Puppet Plays, the stage 
plays, and Marlowe gave certain indications, but Lessing 
had before this spurned the tragic ending as morally and 
artistically unacceptable. Goethe, too, said at a much 
later time that the full and final plan of Faust — and this 
involves the hero's redemption — ^had been before his mind 
from the very first. On that point memory may conceivably 
have deceived him. Carlyle, Blackie, and most English 
writers state definitely that Goethe's early Faust succumbs. 
We cannot go so far as that. A full discussion of the 
subject would show a preponderance of probability on our 
side and some insuperable difficulties on the other. In the 
meantime Faust remained a fragment, frequently thought 
of, but little added to for twenty years, and when Goethe 
took it up again, it had become so strange and his own 
character and style had altered so much, that an artistic 
unity was impossible. It might have been attained if 
Goethe, as in other w^orks, had simply discarded the original 
casting, but this was so absolutely bone of his bone, so 
thoroughly an artistic experience, that only superficial 
alterations seemed admissible and advisable. 

In 1776 Goethe came to Weimar. Wieland and Knebel 
were already there. Herder followed immediately on Goethe's 
recommendation, Schiller later, and thus was formed that 
admirable literary circle which would hardly have been 
possible at any of the other German courts. Goethe proved 



LITERATURE 169 

eminently useful to his patron, Karl August, and there was 
a danger, as Wieland saw, that his numerous duties might 
mean so much time lost for art. But character, as Goethe 
said later in Tasso, unlike talent, can only be formed in the 
stream of life. The insight into affairs of state and the 
intercourse with new types of men and women bore splendid 
fruit in the clarifying of his views and in the leading con- 
ceptions of several of his later works. The passionate 
friendship for Charlotte von Stein was at once an inspira- 
tion and an insidious danger, but the Goethe who hurried 
away to Italy in 1786 was a clearer, riper, and more equably 
balanced man than the youth who entered Weimar ten years 
before. Moreover, in lyrical and ballad poetry, this period 
is exceptionally fruitful. Poems like To the Moon, The 
Erlkingy The Fisher, and, above all, the philosophical pieces 
The Limits of Man, The Divine, The Song of the Spirits, 
touch the highest point that Goethe reached in this sphere. 
And the initial conception of some of his greatest work, 
Iphigenie, Tasso, Wilhelm Meister, germinated in these 
happy and inspiring years. 

What Italy meant to Goethe we can read in The Italian 
Journey. He visited all the places of interest, drank in 
the refreshing beauty and brightness of Italian life, talked 
with painters and sculptors, continued to sketch as he had 
done from youth, but now with new models before him, 
and gradually assimilated, partly with open eyes, partly 
unconsciously, the classical ideal of beauty. Compare 
Iphigenie with Gotz or Clavigo, and the difference is appa- 
rent. Gotz is the formless expression of genius, Clavigo is 
average stage drama in commonplace language, while 
Iphigenie is both drama and consummate poetry. He has 
taken the work of Euripides as his basis, but Iphigenie is 
no longer the cunning, revengeful Greek — she is Goethe's 
ideal of Teutonic womanhood, strong, true, and steadfast 
in faith, and it is this strength of hers, and not the deus 
ex machina of Euripides, that leads to her brother's redemp- 
tion and her own safe return to Greece. Another drama 



170 GERMAN CULTURE 

was worked out in Italy, though not completed till the 
poet's return to Weimar. George Lewes' verdict, that Tasso 
is '' a series of faultless scenes, but no drama,'' has become 
classic, though it is not altogether true. On the stage 
Tasso makes a very fair show. There is little outward 
action, but of mental conflict and activity there is no want. 
The interest of this work lies in the fact that the soul of a 
poet has here been pourtrayed by another poet worthy of 
the task. The conflict is one which Goethe had himself 
experienced, that between art and life, or, in Tasso's case, 
the clash of poetry with the ambition to attain worldly 
fame and rank. As in the previous drama, the beautiful 
verses form a fitting garment for the noble theme. 

The third drama of this period, Egmont, deals with a 
historical subject, and is written in prose. He has taken 
great freedom with the facts, but it is questionable whether 
he has made Egmont, with all his amiability and unsuspect- 
ing frankness, a convincing tragic hero. Schiller thought 
not, and though Schiller was not always a reliable critic, he 
was right on this occasion. Egmont is purblind in his sim- 
plicity of soul, and lacking in that grit and strength of mind 
which a conflict with an adverse fate involves. The char- 
acter of Klarchen, in her simple innocence and magnificeni 
heroism, is the best thing in the book. It adds one more to 
the list of female characters which are the joy and charm 
of Goethe's creative work. 

It must have been a strange experience to Goethe that 
the public which had greeted enthusiastically unripe works 
like Werther and Gotz, should pay practically no attention 
to Tasso, IphigeniCy Egmont, or the Faust of 1790. Since 
his return from Italy Goethe must have grown conscious of 
his loneliness. As he said, with special reference to the 
verse of Iphigenie, no one seemed to thank him for his 
infinite pains, for the great strides which he had made. He 
bore the disappointment with complete outward calm, as 
was his wont, but his reluctance at first to make the closer 
acquaintance of Schiller, who had earned his fame with 




LITERATURE 171 

"Storm and Stress" plays, his abandonment of poetry in 
favour of scientific studies about I790,his share in the satirical 
Xenia of 1795, and the attempt to get on good terms with 
his audience in the Prelude on the Stage, which he prefixed 
to Faust when he took up that work anew in 1797, show us 
clearly enough that Goethe had been disappointed and dis- 
couraged by a public which preferred the light fare of 
Kotzebue and Iffiand to the serious work of art. 

The beginning of the intimate association with Schiller 
stirred Goethe once more to poetical activity. This famous 
hterary friendship lasted without interruption from 1794 
till Schiller's death in 1805. It is unique in the case of two 
poets of such importance, it was a great gain to both, and 
it forms a splendid testimony to their forbearance and keen- 
ness in the cause of art. Schiller had more gaps to fill in 
his culture than Goethe, but the latter profited by the 
stimulus to turn to better account what he had already 
acquired. The Xenia, to which Goethe first turned his hand, 
are of little moment. He did not need to be a Goethe, 
and it did not lie in his nature, to chastise the nonentities 
of the day. From these he turned to the ballad and pro- 
duced some of his maturest pieces, The Bride of Corinth, 
The God and the Bajadere, The Magician's Apprentice, and 
The Treasure-digger, He brought to completion his most 
ambitious novel, William Meisters Apprenticeship, which 
had been started many years before. Recently the 
earliest sketch of this work, William Meister*s Theatrical 
Mission, was discovered. The finished work is superior in 
style, broader and riper in conception. It follows slowly 
and by many a meandering path William's experiences in the 
theatrical and aristocratic world of the eighteenth century. 
It is long and not faultless in construction. But the episodes 
are told interestingly and artistically. The leading idea is 
to show how a man with no definite purpose or strong will 
of his own goes out into the world and is gradually moulded 
and taught by his experiences. It is what the Germans, 
who are very fond of this form, call an Entwicklungs- 



172 GERMAN CULTURE 



a?;" 



romatiy a novel of development or education or culture, as 
one may choose to regard it. For at least forty years it 
formed the model for a long list of imitations. The most 
interesting figures in the book are Mignon and the old 
harper, two remarkably original and entrancing characters. 
To many readers — Carlyle, for example — ^the discussions on 
all manner of subjects, literary, social, ethical, and political, 
contributed largely to the enjoyment of the book. 

While William Meister no longer appeals to us as it 
did to an earlier age, Hermann and Dorothea possesses the 
secret of eternal youth. It is so thoroughly German, too, in 
its quaint mixture of the naive and the dignified, the earnest, 
the humorous, and the pathetic. It points backwards to 
Biirger's Luise and forwards to a whole chain of works, 
Morike's Idyll of Lake Constance and Keller's Romeo and 
Julia, whicli represent with the delicate, idealising hand 
of the classicist the humble joys and sorrows, trials and 
triumphs, or, it may be, tragedies of village and country 
life. Morike has the greater fund of humour, Goethe the 
superior skill in visualising the scene and delineating the 
characters. The use of the hexameter gives a touch of the 
Homeric to the simple theme. Goethe has here proved his 
own statement, that there is poetry everywhere, if the 
poet can only bring it out. 

From the beginning of the nineteenth century Goethe 
shows signs of growing old. He was now more than fifty 
years of age. It is seen not in a falling-off in poetical power, 
but rather in a certain aloofness and inability or unwilling- 
ness to respond to new suggestions. Thus, as Pandora, 
contributions to the Propylaea, and Helena show, he re- 
mained a classicist while others had been carried away by 
the Romantic movement. There are romantic elements in 
Fausty and the Divan shows an interest in Oriental poetry 
which was characteristic of Romanticism, but on the whole 
Goethe's own development is completed. His work now 
points backwards rather than forwards. That is the case 
with his Poetry and Truth, begun in 1811, which records 



LITERATURE 173 

artistically but with a fairly strict adherence to facts, his 
life up to 1776. The Theory of Colour, in which he opposed 
Newton, shows that we must not take too high a view of 
Goethe's scientific achievements. They are frequently 
exaggerated. He has contributed suggestions, but his 
scientific dilettantism is of interest principally as the hobby 
of a great poet with a remarkable range of interests. The 
continuation of William Meister proved an error, for the cir- 
cumstances of the nineteenth century were so entirely 
different and, it may be frankly said, no longer of such 
interest or inspiration to the aging poet. As it stands, it is 
nothing but a shapeless mass with little to recommend it 
but a few of the short stories that are woven into the varied 
patchwork. The Elective Affinities was intended as one of 
these stories, but it grew so much under Goethe's hand that 
he made it an independent novel. The theme, which shows 
how like draws to like, in opposition even to bonds of mar- 
riage or convention, is somewhat coldly and analytically 
discussed, the characters are remote and exceptional, and the 
whole somewhat prolonged. Ottilie's diary, which is the 
receptacle naturally of Goethe's thoughts rather than 
Ottilie's, interferes seriously with the artistic unity of the 
novel. 

Some of the best work of Goethe's old age is contained 
in his epigrams in prose and poetry. His late ballads, on 
the other hand, are rather lifeless. His lyrical poetry has 
grown more reflective and objective. In the West-Eastern 
Divan the pulse of passion beats more languidly, but there 
is the compensating charm of wisdom, self-mastery, and 
humour in the subjective parts of this Persian garden of 
blossoms. The pages of Art and Antiquity show how 
Goethe continued to be interested in literature, art, and 
science. His Diaries, his correspondence, and especially 
the Conversations with Goethe, which Eckermann recorded, 
are invaluable for the student of Goethe's work and per- 
sonality. His last artistic effort was devoted to the com- 
pletion of Faust, which had, as it were, accompanied him 



174 GERMAN CULTURE 

through Hfe. It was bom of the *' Storm and Stress/' it 
drew its early inspiration from folk-poetry and legend, it 
went with Goethe to Italy, it bears traces of Classicism, of 
the French Revolution, the Romantic movement, and of 
Goethe's admiration for Byron. It was principally the 
first two and the last two acts of the second part that 
remained to be done — the Helena forms the third — and 
now they were to be completed in the calm of the poet's 
old age. He accomplished the task not always in a form 
artistically beautiful, but with a profimdity and wealth of 
imagination worthy of the beginnings. In the last act, 
which is one of the best, we see the old man — Faust is now 
a hundred years old — still striving and optimistic like the 
aged Goethe himself. He has foresworn everything but his 
idealism. This dunkel Drang has driven him through 
sin and bitter experience to clarity, and has enabled him 
by the grace of God finally to emerge triumphant over 
evil. No work can occupy a poet for sixty years and be 
the final expression of his philosophy of life without suffer- 
ing in form. Some things, certainly, like the Walpurgis- 
nachtstraum, might well have been omitted. But small 
flaws are easily overlooked in a work which is so great in 
conception and range, so full of human questions of the 
deepest interest, such as the meaning and power of evil 
and the spiritual freedom of men, not put as cold, academic 
questions, but moulded into poetry from the experience of a 
long and fruitful life. Faust is the eighteenth century as 
seen and lived by the greatest of eighteenth-century poets, 
and remains the one great work in German which, without 
hesitation, we may rank among the literary masterpieces 
of the world. 

There was a time, about the middle of last century, 
when Johann Friedrich von Schiller was regarded as the 
compeer, if not the superior, of Goethe. Wolfgang Menzel 
had made the most of Goethe's weaknesses, and Schiller, 
as the poet of freedom, was warmly cherished by a revolu- 
tionary age. In no respect, however, can he bear com- 



LITERATURE 175 

parison with Goethe. He lacked Goethe's advantages, but 
he lacked also his mental breadth. Till within ten years 
of his death, his life was a struggle, for a livelihood on the 
one hand and to attain culture on the other. The story of 
his education under and flight from the despotism of the 
Wiirtemberg Court is well known, but even harder days 
were in store for him until Komer of Dresden stretched 
out a helping hand. The early work is poor in form, 
especially the Anthologie, and even plays like The Robbers 
or Intrigue and Love are only redeemed by individual scenes 
or by a few characters like the music-teacher Miller and the 
secretary Wurm. Don Carlos, which was partly '' Storm 
and Stress " work, partly under the influence of a ripening 
Classicism, is better, though the unity of the drama suffered 
by the change. The next few years, in which Schiller was 
devoting himself to historical and philosophical study, 
latterly as Professor of History in Jena, were equally un- 
productive of really great work. Poems like The Artists, 
or the History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands, or the 
essays on Grace and Dignity, The Nature of Tragedy, &c., 
can in no sense be considered great literature. They are 
important and interesting enough, especially as the mile- 
stones in Schiller's rapid development. But a different view 
must be taken of the extraordinary productivity of his last 
ten years. He attains greatness in philosophical poetry with 
pieces like The Ideals, The Walk, and The Song of the Bell. 
He is perhaps even greater, and certainly more popular 
as the author of ballads like The Cranes of Ibykus, The 
Diver, The Glove, and The Fight with the Dragon, Here 
he grasps the ethical thought below the bald narrative of 
his sources and brings it out with rare imaginative power. 
And, strangest of all, to one who knows the weakness of 
the youthful poet, he is now as victoriously master of the 
form as of the content. Here we see to some extent 
Goethe's influence, but to a larger degree it was due to 
the ripening of the poet's character and taste. The third 
sphere of Schiller's activity was the drama. Wallenstein, 



arefl 



176 GERMAN CULTURE 

Maria Stuart, The Maid of Orleans^ and William Tell 
so familiar that discussion of them is scarcely necessary. 
They show admirable skill in dramatic construction, they 
are grandiose, idealised pictures of great events and per- 
sonalities, and lastly they are poetry. Passages like the 
separation of Max and Wallenstein, Joan of Arc's farewell 
to her native valley, Mortimer's description of the impres- 
siveness of Catholicism, and Tell's monologue as he waits 
for Gessner in the hohle Gasse show us what Schiller could 
do when at the height of his powers. A great gulf lies 
between these plays and the realism of the modem stage, 
but they still live and are universally regarded as the best 
that German dramatic art has to show. 

To turn from Goethe and Schiller to Holderlin and 
Richter is to descend considerably. Holderlin combined 
a passionate enthusiasm for Greek life and culture with an 
adoration of nature which belonged rather to the nine- 
teenth century. His larger works hardly count nowadays. 
It is as a lyrical poet that he is remembered. This activity, 
too, was cut short by insanity in 1802, but in the few years 
since the beginning of his unhappy love he had produced a 
handful of poems pervaded by a noble and subdued pessi- 
mism, full of an ardent worship of the beauties of nature, 
and in a form which has something of the dignity of 
Classical art and the attractive sweetness of Romantic 
poetry. Jean Paul is also in many ways a transition 
figure. His formlessness is rooted in the " Storm and 
Stress," while his sentiment, degenerating often into senti- 
mentality, is of the spirit of the early nineteenth century. 
He is a keen observer, he has gifts of humour and pathos, 
and is at his best in the description of quaint characters 
from humble life like Quintus Fixlein or Maria Wuz. From 
his numerous works, which are now practically dead, one 
might select scenes and sentences that deserve to live, but 
no individual book, except, perhaps, Levana, which is 
interesting educationally, is altogether satisfactory. Many 
of his ideas have been taken up by modem writers, but his 



LITERATURE 177 

style is the worst ever written by a German of genius, and 
a much lower opinion must be formed of his merits than was 
once held, for example, by Carlyle. 

The Classical age of German literature is unique in its 
individualism and cosmopolitanism. Lessing spoke once 
of love of fatherland as *' heroic weakness," though he 
worked for a national theatre and a pure German language. 
Herder, regarding all men as citizens of God's city on 
earth, will allow no narrow national spirit. Goethe's in- 
difference to national affairs is well known. Politics were, 
in his view, the affair of statesmen, to him art and science 
were the highest things. Man interested him not as a 
unit in a state, but as an individual in himself. Hence 
his dislike for the spirit of Rome and his enthusiasm for 
Greece. Schiller's views changed from time to time. In 
youth he was revolutionary, republican, and cosmopolitan ; 
he speaks of patriotic interest as being only for unripe 
nations — for the youth of the world. After the French 
Revolution he discarded republicanism, and in Tell 
sang the praises of a people defending its liberties. The 
Classical Age was again marked by enlightenment, and by 
toleration in religion. This we see in Lessing, Goethe, and 
Schiller, while Herder and Richter had more definitely 
Christian sympathies. To Herder and Schiller humanity 
is the great aim, history is the study of humanity in its 
natural and inevitable advance. Schiller has been well 
called a Weltverbesserer ; he believes firmly in the idea of 
progress. We find the same spirit in regard to education, 
especially in Lessing, Herder, and Richter. Goethe, Herder, 
and Richter all denounce mere philological teaching. Goethe, 
however, has great faith in classics as a model, so, too, Less- 
ing, while Herder and Richter wanted a German art and a 
more practical education. To Goethe individual culture is the 
important thing, and culture he regarded as rooted in this 
life. ** The purpose .of life," he said, " is life itself." There* 
can be no question that it was the decentralisation of 
Germany and the radical differences in the several courts 

M 



178 GERMAN CULTURE 



the I 
lin,| 



that on the one hand explain and on the other made 
expression of such views possible. Goethe disliked Berlin 
and the drama of Schiller would have been as impossible 
there as in Wiirtemberg. Whether in a modem Germany 
these writers would have thought and written differently 
is probably a futile question. But there can be no doubt 
that, apart, of course, from the spell which genius always 
exercises, it is just this breadth of vision, this individualism 
and steadfast idealism in art as in life that make German 
classical literature so interesting and valuable from an 
international point of view. 

B. MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE 

The most striking feature of modem German literature 
is its complexity. The nineteenth century was fruitful in 
ideas, discoveries, and intellectual movements, but they 
were frequently concurrent or so inextricably interlaced in 
their influence upon literature that a simplified scheme of 
the development is impossible. In his History of German 
Literature in the Nineteenth Century, the late Richard M. 
Meyer simply divided the period into decades, but such a 
solution is a mere confession of helplessness. The prevail- 
ing tendency in the first thirty years of the century is the 
Romantic. This movement took the form of a revolt 
against the criticism of Lessing and all other attempts to 
place restraints upon art and its expression, and enthusias- 
tically asserted the ascendancy of imagination and feeling 
over reason and criticism. It is the most original of all 
German literary movements and the one which has influenced 
most strongly the literatures of neighbouring countries. In 
various forms it may be said to have lived on, in spite of 
reactions, in Morike, Scheffel, Wagner, Storm, and others 
almost to the present day. Side by side with this there has 
been a steady increase of interest in simple indigenous art — 
what the Germans call das Volkstiimliche, We see this in 
Gorres* Volksbilcher, in the collections of folk-songs by Amim 



LITERATURE 179 

and Brentano, Uhland and Liliencron, in the novel of village 
life, in the popularity of the peasant as the hero of novel and 
drama, in the Heimatkunst or purely local art of the pre- 
sent time. This movement inspired some of the best work 
of Morike, Auerbach, Keller, Storm, Groth, and Fontane. 
Throughout the century, too, there is a current of patriotic 
and political poetry. In the rising against Napoleon, in 1840 
and again in 1870, it is a poetry of war directed against 
France. In Borne, Heine, and their successors it assumes the 
form of a radical agitation against the strictness of the 
censorship and the want of representative government. 
In Herwegh, Heine, Storm, and many more it is a longing 
for national unity. When this was achieved, it appeared 
again in the dramas of Wildenbruch as a glorification of 
Prussia and the HohenzoUerns, while in more recent times, 
under the influence of men like Treitschke and Nietzsche, 
it has assumed the form of worship of force and militarism, 
imitated and expressed in many minor writers, but with 
notable reactions, as in Bertha von Suttner's famous novel 
Disarm, A much deeper and more fruitful literary move- 
ment was that which was derived after 1871 from social 
forces. The transformation of Germany into an industrial 
nation gave rise to the social problem, the Social Democratic 
party, and the naturalistic school of literature. Here 
writers direct their attention to the lower strata of society, 
and portray these exactly as they see them. The literary 
photograph usurps the place of the literary picture. Since 
1895, however, there are signs of a neo-romantic revival, in 
which the supernatural and the imaginative, symbolism 
and allegory are once more asserting themselves. Besides 
these there are minor currents, the enthusiasm for freedom 
roused by the Greek War of Independence, a recurrence to 
Classicism in Grillparzer, Platen, and Wagner, a strong vein 
of pessimism which revealed itself in the Weltschmerz of 
Lenau and became, under Schopenhauer, the prevailing tone 
in the middle of the century. The fact that the nineteenth 
century has been a learned age has brought new literatures, 



180 GERMAN CULTURE 

especially those of India and Persia, under review, and has 
led to determined efforts to clarify criticism and aesthetics. 
Much that has been written bears the stamp of zeal rather 
than of genius. This, too, has been an age of great his- 
torians — Niebuhr, Ranke, Treitschke, Mommsen ; and litera- 
ture has burrowed industriously but with no great success 
in this field. The wonders of science threatened at one 
time to remove the crown from poetry, but in later years 
the theories of biologists in particular have presented a rich 
fund for literary motives. The religious question which was 
opened up in a new sense by Strauss' Life of Jesus in 1836, 
the growth of the Higher Criticism, and the clash of philo- 
sophical systems (Kampf um die Weltanschauung), have 
bulked largely in modem intellectual life and find their 
reflection, one may say, in all writers of importance. 

I. Romanticism. — From 1798, when the Aihenceumy the 
organ of the Romantic school, was founded by the brothers 
Schlegel and Tieck, to the Greek War of Independence, is 
the first epoch in modern German literature. As a period 
it was fruitful in suggestions and ideas which affected not 
only literature, but also, and perhaps to a greater degree, 
philology, historical research, criticism and education. In 
letters it resembles the " Storm and Stress," of which it was the 
direct descendant, in that it failed completely to produce 
masterpieces. In the novel and drama the demand for 
individual freedom destroyed all sense of technique ; in the 
lyric the aesthetic aloofness from real life characteristic of 
a Novalis degenerated into vagueness and anaemia. The 
world of a Brentano, Eichendorff, or Uhland is largely 
mediaeval and phantastic, and in consequence the literary 
harvest of these twenty-five years is meagre. In a rapid 
review we would note the translation of Shakespeare by 
A. W. von Schlegel, some of his brother Friedrich's criticism, 
Kleist's dramas, a handful of poems from NovaUs and 
Eichendorff, contributions to the short story from Tieck 
and Hoffmann, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Chamisso's Peter 
Schlemihl, perhaps Fouque's Undine, certainly Eichen- 



LITERATURE 181 

dorff's Life of a Good-for-Nothing and Uhland's ballads. 
The real genius in this group was Heinrich von Kleist, who 
showed equal power in tragedy and comedy. There is 
acute, humorous portrayal of the topsy-turvyness of village 
life in The Broken Pitcher, Penthesilea, on the other hand, 
the tragedy of the Amazonian Queen who destroys what she 
most loves, is high poetry, elevated and dignified. Kdthchen 
of Heilhronn is over-sentimental, a drama of extremes, but 
it has charm, and that is the important thing. The Prince 
of Homburg is Kleist's masterpiece. It represents with 
great historical freedom, but very convincingly, the char- 
acter of the Prince who won the battle of Fehrbellin in 
disobedience to the orders of the Elector of Brandenburg. 
It is an interesting picture of a mind woven of imagination, 
love, impetuosity, cowardice, and heroism. The same 
psychological minuteness is to be noted in Kleist's best 
story, Michael Kohlhaas. Unfortunately, Kleist's character 
was not made for happiness. His patriotic dramas could 
find no place on the stage during the domination of Napo- 
leon. Goethe's failure to see his promise had also a dis- 
couraging effect, and Kleist put an end to his life in 1811, 
before his name was made. The ballads of Ludwig Uhland 
were mostly written between 1805 and 1830, the last half of 
his life being devoted largely to scholarship and politics. 
He was a Swabian, and stands apart from the contemporary 
romanticists, especially in his clear, effective style. The 
subjects of his ballads are drawn from legend and history, 
the figures are frequently mediaeval, but he makes them live. 
He is a master of many styles, from the epic breadth of 
The Minstrel's Curse to the dramatic intenseness of The 
Blind King, or the lyrical sweetness of Der Wirtin Tochter- 
lein. His dramas and lyrics fall far short of his ballad work, 
but here he is entitled to a place in the front rank. 

2. The Age of Heine. — The second quarter of the 
century comes to a definite close with the revolution of 1848. 
It is much less uniform in character than the preceding 
age. In Heinrich Heine, the most conspicuous figure of the 



182 GERMAN CULTURE 

period, we see a strong romantic vein, especially in his 
inimitable Book of Songs. But even here there are sign^ 
of revolt in that keen irony which turns its shafts upon the 
fairy forms and phantoms and dissolves them into nothing- 
ness. This attitude was due to disappointments in life and 
love, to his clear Jewish intellect, and the radical tendencies 
of his mind. His political and critical writings have 
exercised a strong influence upon the style of modem 
journalism, but they fade into insignificance before his 
merits as a poet and a writer of descriptive prose. He has 
that wit and esprit which are so rare in German litera- 
ture, and as a master of prose style only Nietzsche among 
the modems can be compared with him. In lyrical and 
ballad poetry his imagination, which in its glow and splendour 
is Jewish rather than German, enabled him to achieve the 
highest that can be attained by purely romantic means. 
But he broke through the romantic tradition and became 
the poet of life as he saw and felt it. He is, as George 
Eliot said, not a mere echo, but a real voice. That voice 
is sometimes grating and repulsive, but sometimes it is 
inexpressibly sweet, and, in spite of all his anti-Semitic 
disparagers. The Two Grenadiers, the North Sea Pictures, 
portions of the Travel Pictures, and some of the poems 
composed in his last years on his *' mattress-grave," are 
among the great things in the German language. 

Apart from Heine, the " young Germans,'' Borne, Laube, 
and Gutzkow, and the political poetry of the 'forties do not 
merit much attention. Literature and public life were in 
conflict. Fritz Renter spent seven years in prison for 
wearing the political colours of a club. Heine and Borne 
went into exile, and after the revolution Herwegh, Wagner, 
and Freiligrath had to follow their example. The mass of 
poetry which sprang from the agitation is rhetorical and 
only of temporary interest. Freiligrath has something of 
a reputation among us, due partly to his long stay in 
London, but his really good poems are few in number. 
Some of the patriotic songs have lived, hke Becker's Wacht 



LITERATURE 183 

am Rhein, and it is interesting that the other national 
song, Deutschland iiber A lies, Jfirst appeared in a collection of 
poetry which cost the author, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, 
his professorship in Breslau. 

The Swabian and Austrian literature of this period, 
which has little reference to politics or nationality, is much 
more artistic. Eduard Morike is scarcely yet known be- 
yond Germany, but he is one of the three or four best 
German lyricists. He carried on the Romantic traditions, 
but he is, to a greater degree, the poet of his own Swabian 
people and home. The secret of his art is simplicity and 
truth. As a country minister he had the leisure and oppor- 
tunity to observe the interesting traits of his parishioners 
and the life of nature around him. He was hypochondriac, 
a day-dreamer, intensely disinclined to work — he would have 
a substitute preaching while he would be lying on his back 
in the manse garden. His prose is inferior to his poetry, 
because it is more formless, and he lacked constructive talent. 
His ballads are scarcely vivid enough, but in the naivete 
and quaint humour of his idylls he has no rival in German, 
and his lyrics, The Forsaken Maid, Agnes, Peregrina, The 
Gardener, The Soldier's Bride, are models of sweetness and 
harmony. 

Swabia produced other interesting writers, Kemer, 
Schwab, and Vischer, and it was here that Nicolaus Lenau, 
the Austrian poet, was first recognised. He had many of 
the poet's gifts, melody of verse, imagination, and sublimity 
of soul. He brought into literature a new landscape, the 
pustas of Austria, and he peopled them with figures which 
pulsate with dramatic life. His visit to America, dis- 
appointing though it proved, brought in a new harvest of 
poems. Over all, however, from first to last, lies the 
melancholy, the resigned hopelessness of the man who, 
unfortunate as he was unpractical, could find no place for 
himself in the scheme of things. The atmosphere of Austria 
seems to have engendered this kind of pessimism. Under 
the regime of Mettemich music alone enjoyed freedom. 



184 GERMAN CULTURE 

Here Beethoven and Schubert composed some of their best 
work. But the Hterary man feels himself in fetters, unable 
to develop his ideals. Lenau's life ended in insanity, 
Raimund shot himself, and Franz Grillparzer, Austria's 
greatest dramatist, shut himself off from publicity at the 
very height of his powers. In his three great plays, Sappho, 
the trilogy The Golden Fleece, and Hero, Grillparzer has sought 
to blend Classical form and legend with modem sentiments 
and problems. The first is the tragedy of the poetess who 
seeks earthly love and happiness in addition to the heavenly 
gift of song. The second is the finest rendering of the 
story of Jason and Medea in ancient or modern literature. 
In the third it is the study of Hero rather than of Leander, 
the problem of the priestess who takes her vows before she 
knows what it means, and is overwhelmed by love when it 
comes, that holds our interest. The background of the 
lonely temple, with the ever-present fatal sea, is woven into 
the play with a skilful hand. Very different from these are 
the other plays of Grillparzer, King Ottokar*s Greatness and 
Fally a historical drama, and the comedy. Woe to him who 
Lies. It was the rejection of the latter play that caused 
Grillparzer to cease writing for the public. Of the plays 
published after his death only the Jewess of Toledo can be 
called a success. Grillparzer 's high aims were not under- 
stood in Vienna, and he was easily discouraged. It was 
certainly galling that the Viennese preferred the sentimental 
plays of Friedrich Halm, the witty but superficial farces of 
Nestroy, or the comedies of Raimund, who sometimes, 
indeed, by his excellent technique and skill in portrayal of 
character, proved himself a not unworthy rival. From a 
literary point of view, these men stand to Grillparzer as 
Griin and Zedlitz stand to Lenau ; they are part of the 
Austrian development, but do not rise very far above 
mediocrity. 

The novel in this period is poor. The works of Gutzkow 
and Laube are forgotten. Immermann lives only by the 
story Oberhof, one of the earliest village tales. Willebald 



LITERATURE 185 

Alexis, the Brandenburg historian, is lifeless and long- 
winded, and there only remains Wilhelm Hauff, who cer- 
tainly had the gift of story-telling, though the merit of 
his chief work, Lichtenstein, in itself a most readable book, 
is lessened by the fact of its being so close an imitation of 
the manner of Scott. 

Romanticism lingered on in one or other of its phases 
in the writers of this age. Wilhelm Miiller excelled as a 
song-writer who learned his art from the Volkslied, 
Friedrich Riickert represents the Oriental interests of the 
Romantic school, but he wrote too much, and his Wisdom of 
the Brahmas is heavy and didactic. Platen, too, was inter- 
ested in Persian forms, but otherwise he is anti-romantic 
in his literary comedies like The Fatal Fork, a skit on the 
fate-tragedies, and in the Classicism, both in spirit and 
execution, of his lyrical poetry. He was a somewhat lonely 
figure, and even yet his poetry has found few admirers. 
It appears cold and statuesque. The recent publication of 
his Diaries has made it clear that Platen was an interesting 
personality, a scholar, a thinker, a kindly friend, but he 
failed to express himself, and bears to-day the reputation 
of a form-perfect but frigid poet of the aristocratic type. 
Another solitary figure in this age is the WestphaJian 
poetess, Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff, She tried various 
literary forms to give expression to the life and beauty of 
her homeland, in which her whole soul and art are rooted, 
but she succeeded principally in the short story and the 
lyric. The Beech-tree of the Jew, a fine study of the way 
in which a country lad is driven to murder, and years after 
to atonement, is, with the Oberhof, one of the earliest and 
best Dorfnovellen. Her lyrics are strong rather than grace- 
ful, for she objected to filing and smoothing. '' Let them 
be as they are," she said. But the poetic, sometimes 
passionate, sometimes old-maidish soul is there, and a kin- 
ship with nature which is almost bodily attachment. She 
was extremely short-sighted, and dwells consequently on 
the sounds of nature and the minute things which most 



186 GERMAN CULTURE 

poetry overlooks. The Night Spent in Waking, Moon- 
rise, and In the Moss are characteristic of her art, which 
combines deUcacy of feehng with Hnes which in their sturdy 
strength remind us of granite rather than of marble. 

3. The Age of Keller. — The third quarter of the 
century, roughly from 1848 to 1870, but extending in some 
cases beyond these limits, was the richest in artistic achieve- 
ment of any modem period. It was a time of stress and 
trial, it saw the great wars against Denmark, Austria, and 
France, and it is noteworthy that it was so much more 
fruitful than the last period, which was marked by peace 
and great industrial prosperity. The radical agitation 
became silent, the motto of the Munich School was " Art 
for art's sake,'' and that meant detachment from con- 
temporary life, interest in history, and description of 
countries and manners other than those of Germany. Geibel, 
Heyse, and Scheffel were the chief figures in the Munich 
circle, but they had many satellites like Greif, Schack, 
Bodenstedt, Lingg, and Leuthold. Nowadays the poetry 
of these authors is not rated high. A few songs in pleasing 
form but of no depth are its chief legacy. Only Scheffel 
and Heyse have distinguished themselves permanently. 
Heyse is the mbst prolific writer of stories in German. His 
originality is astonishing, and he has the sense of style. In 
his larger novels, Children of the World, In Paradise, &c., 
he is less successful, for here his superficial knowledge of 
life, especially middle and lower class life, becomes more 
evident. Scheffel is the author of the Trumpeter ofSdckingen, 
a vigorous but by no means great epic, and of a really well- 
told story, Ekkehard, a picture of Swabian life in the early 
Middle Ages. The main theme is modem, for it is the 
story of the monk's love for his high-bom mistress, and 
touches on the question of celibacy among the Catholic 
clergy. Frau Hadwig, too, is rather much of the modem 
coquette, but, despite its faults, Ekkehard is extremely 
interesting, and remains, so far, the best historical novel 
in German. 



LITERATURE 187 

The Munich School was in its time the hope and pride of 
German letters, but that reputation has gone for ever, 
because far better work was done by the men who stood 
outside it altogether, but who had to wait a good few 
years for their merits to be recognised. The novel, in 
particular, showed great vitality. Little attention need be 
paid to the stories of American life by Sealsfield and 
Gerstacker or the military sketches of Hacklander. The 
best work grew out of the Dorfnovelle, Berthold Auerbach's 
Tales of the Black Forest are frequently unreal and senti- 
mental, but where they are not, as in Diethelm of Buchen- 
bergy they are altogether enjoyable. In Jeremias Gotthelf 
there is excellent humour, for example, in The Notary in 
the Trap, but occasionally also a fairly strong vein of 
moralising. What these men began on a small scale, 
Renter, Ludwig, and Keller carried oh with greater genius. 
Fritz Renter's stories and verse-anecdotes are in Platt- 
deutsch, a sign of the growing realism of the age, and this 
is an essential feature of the work. Translated into High 
German, they lose half of their humour and flavour. The 
same applies to the lyrics and ballads of Klaus Groth. 
Otto Ludwig's stories have also a marked local colouring, 
and sometimes he uses dialect. In his chief novel, Between 
Heaven and Earth, he has surpassed himself in weaving 
from the simple motives of Thuringian village life a story 
of universal human interest. The scene is the home of a 
slater and his family, and the theme, as it unfolds, reveals 
the tragedy of suspicious old age in its tyranny over efficient 
youth, and the equally tragic conflict between the con- 
scientious ApoUonius and his unscrupulous brother, who 
steals his betrothed, and subsequently, driven by conscience 
and vice, almost wrecks the lives of all concerned. The 
story is very finely worked out, and is one of the best 
novels of family life in German. Ludwig tried his hand 
at the drama also, but with less success. His plots are 
rather loosely constructed, and, when reading them, we 
feel that they would have been better in the form of novels. 



188 GERMAN CULTURE 

Gottfried Keller is by universal consent the greatest of 
these writers of stories. Apart from Heine, who is so 
different that comparison is impossible, he is the most 
conspicuous figure in the whole nineteenth century. He 
has not the lightness and grace of a Heyse, but in the 
keenness of his observation, the richness of his humour, and 
his rugged, profound, but wonderfully plastic powers of 
presentation, he is excelled by Goethe alone. Some of his 
work, like the long autobiographical novel Green Henry, 
demands a certain maturity in its readers. It might well 
be called the '' William Meister '* of the nineteenth century. 
His lyrical and ballad work is somewhat uneven, sometimes 
rather vague and lacking in melody, but in the short story 
he has no peer. The People of Seldwyla appeared in 1856, 
and gave already a token of his merits, but these were 
unrecognised, except by a few, till a second part came out 
in 1874. The stories are of all kinds, humorous, pathetic, 
tragic, and the same mastery is revealed in each sphere. 
Romeo and Juliet in Village Life is an example. The 
quarrel of the parents about a trifling field boundary is 
told with such quaint humour that the reader feels he is in 
for another frolic. But as the quarrel develops, bringing 
ruin and unhappiness in its train, till Sali and Vrenchen 
determine to have one last day of enjoyment before the 
river closes over their embraced forms, the master has us 
under his spell, and we follow breathless to the close. It is 
all told so simply, with no forced pathos or sentimentality, 
that the art conceals itself. In Seven Legends Keller leaves 
the sphere of Swiss life and retells with irresistible humour, 
which, like all true humour, has a great deal of wisdom in 
it, some mediaeval stories. The Hypocritical Vitalis, the 
story of a zealous monk who was regarded as a vicious 
dissembler, is the best in the volume. Other two collec- 
tions of " Novellen " appeared, the Zurich Stories and the 
Sinngedicht, a series woven round the theme of a bachelor's 
search for a wife. With these stories Keller brought into 
German literature the rugged independence and strength 



LITERATURE 189 

of the Swiss character. His humour is finer and savours 
less of the beer- jug than is frequently the case in German — 
in Scheffel, for example. A master of prose he is not, but 
the style is adequate. It expresses accurately the naivete 
of his genius, the clearness of his visualisation, and the calm 
dignity and repose of his character. 

The Schleswig writer Theodor Storm is not so virile as 
Keller. Early work like Immensee is dainty and sweetly 
sentimental. As he grew older, his characters took more 
definite shape. Stories like Aquis Submersus and John 
Riew display a much healthier realism. His peculiarly 
elegiac, reminiscent temperament found more suitable ex- 
pression in the lyric. His poems are not numerous, but 
they are choice. In them we find in uniformly-pleasing 
lines the poetical revelation of one of the most lovable 
characters in German literature. 

Gustav Freytag is a typical German literary figure. He 
left the lecture-room for journalism, editing for a time the 
Grenzboten, He was interested in the drama, and wrote a 
critical thesis on its technique. He published a very suc- 
cessful comedy. The Journalists, which, though a skit on 
politics and journalism half a century ago, is still of inter- 
est. It is as a novelist, however, that Freytag is best 
known. In Soil und Haben he was the first to give a really 
convincing representation of commercial life, with side- 
lights thrown on other classes. The Lost Manuscript, 
which portrays university and aristocratic circles, was 
neither so well planned nor so true to life. In history, too, 
Freytag was widely read. He published a series of popular 
volumes, entitled, Pictures of the German Past, and his large 
historical novel. The Ancestors, was so much admired that 
it called forth a host of imitators. Men like Dahn and 
Ebers were, however, much more pedantic and less original 
than Freytag. They were at one time the rage, but are 
very nearly forgotten to-day. The first sections of The 
Ancestors, which portray life in the fourth and eighth 
centuries, are much better than the later ones. The later 



190 GERMAN CULTURE 

ages were not so suitable for heroic treatment, and the 
author's own interest in the work had flagged. 

Friedrich Spielhagen was the first of the modem novel- 
ists, but only in spirit, not in style. Problematic Natures, 
Hammer and Anvil, and In Rank and File owed much of 
their interest to the mild socialism of their author. He 
has his theories and works them out with a considerable 
gift of story-telling, but modem criticism has shattered the 
most of his former great reputation by showing up the 
rmreality of his portrayal and the absurdity of his leading 
characters. Wilhelm Raabe, though never so popular, had 
much more literary genius than Spielhagen. His short 
stories are better than the novels. In the latter he re- 
sembles Jean Paul in his stylelessness, his humour, and the 
way in which he interrupts the narrative with personal 
opinions and explanations. To the patient, however, The 
Chronicle of Sparrow Lane or Ahu T elf an provides enter- 
taining reading. 

Some of the authors mentioned above wrote on into the 
last quarter of the century. Paul Heyse died quite recently. 
And there are other authors who might be dealt with in a 
fuller history — Wilbrandt and Jensen, for example, who, 
though they wrote much later, belong in spirit to this age. 
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was similarly only five years 
yormger than his Swiss compatriot Keller, but previous to 
1870 he had published only a small volume of poetry. He 
possessed independent means, and had, hke Keller, hesi- 
tated between poetry and painting. He was doubtful, too, 
at first whether to write in French or German. In Meyer 
we see the diffidence and conscientiousness of the studious 
recluse. His works fill only eight small volumes, but there 
is nothing that had not been pruned and revised till it 
satisfied his fastidious taste. It is difficult to say whether 
he is greater in verse-epic or prose-epic. His ballads The 
Feet in the Fire, The Gliding Purple, King Attilas Sword, 
break away from the traditional ballad style which had 
come down from Percy's Reliques through Biirger, Uhland, 



LITERATURE 191 

and Strachwitz. He is equally dramatic, equally plastic, 
but more concise, more Classical in style. His historical 
novel, Jilrg Jenatsch, is not on the same level as his shorter 
stories, Gustav Adolf's Page, The Amulet, or The Saint, 
He likes to choose his material from that age of great events 
and characters, the Italian Renaissance. He has little 
interest in contemporary life, but in recreating the past in 
story or ballad or epic, as in the charming poem Hutten's 
Last Days, he has very few equals. 

We have already mentioned two of the dramatists of 
this period, Freytag and Ludwig ; the other two, Hebbel 
and Wagner, are of more importance, Friedrich Hebbel is 
the weightiest German writer on drama in the nineteenth 
century, and it is wonderful how this self-taught man 
worked his way up to an artistic conception of life. His 
plays are highly praised by many authorities, but they have 
not been very successful on the stage, and they will hardly 
find a home among us. The biblical Judith is unfortunately 
a repulsive theme, and Maria Magdalene is convincing only 
when we grant the probability of the heroine's moral lapse, but 
in any case we wish it were untrue. Herodes and Marianne, 
again, though excellently constructed, is unsympathetic, for 
Herodes is a fool as well as a tyrant. Agnes Bernauer is the 
tragedy of simple innocence in conflict with the interests 
of the state, and though again the course of events is in- 
evitable and well delineated, the close is repellent to a 
modem audience, whether democratic or not. Gyges and 
his Ring is a fine dramatic rendering of the fable from 
Herodotus, and The Nibelungs, HebbeFs greatest work, is 
a brave effort to dramatise the Middle High German epic. 
Wagner attempted the same theme, but while Hebbel fol- 
lowed the epic fairly closely, except in so far as he sought, 
with doubtful success, to make much more of the contrast 
of Christian ideals, Wagner went back to the old legends and 
filled them with his own artistic conceptions. Wagner's 
influence on art generally can hardly be overestimated. In 
literature it is not great. His dramatic theories have been 



102 GERMAN CULTURE 

followed by few and the text of his operas is not such as 
would commend itself to the imitation of any literary artist. 
4. Living Authors. — The last period of modem German 
literature is to us, who are living and taking part in the prob- 
lems which it presents, naturally of great interest. These 
problems are as manifold as they are important. They 
spring from many sources, the social struggles which new 
industrial conditions have created, the religious question 
which the Higher Criticism stimulated on the one side, and 
which the antagonism of social democracy and of the un- 
socialistic opponent of everything established, Friedrich 
Nietzsche, affected on the other. There is, too, the gather- 
ing conflict between democratic ideals and the autocratic 
monarchy with all the bureaucratic and military authority 
of which it is the head and symbol. There is the clash of 
collectivism and egoistic individualism, there is the slum- 
bering but dangerous antagonism of Papal infallibility and 
the absolutism of the Empire. There has been a powerful 
awakening of national patriotism coupled with a new ex- 
clusiveness towards what is foreign and a desire for political, 
industrial, and cultural expansion. In its imrest this period 
reminds us of the *' Storm and Stress.'' We have seen a new 
literary ideal set up, that of the naturalistic school, which 
is so extreme and prosaic that we can now, when it is dying 
down, hardly understand its former popularity. It would 
substitute the literary sketch for the rounded work of art, 
it banished poetry from the drama, it kept its eye riveted 
on the unsavoury phenomena of life, and made the Muse 
forsake the heights and tread continuously in the gutter. 
In its reaction against the unreality of a Lindau or a Spiel- 
hagen it had some justification, and it has bequeathed a 
residuum of healthy realism to an age with saner and broader 
ideals. In all this period we note the German tendency to 
emphasize the importance of content at the expense of form. 
And it is very doubtful indeed whether very much of the 
enormous production of the present age will survive very 
long after it. Naturally it is the novel that is most fre- 



LITERATURE 193 

quently chosen by young writers as the means of expressing 
their social, political, moral, and other ideals. Yet there is 
no great living novelist in Germany. Among the interest- 
ing individual achievements we note the novels of Berlin 
life by Fontane, who in early life had made a name for him- 
self as ballad- writer and historical novelist. There is the 
Dame Care of Sudermann, a charming study of country life, 
far above the author's later work. Frenssen has published 
several interesting books, Jorn Uhl, which owes not a little 
to Sudermann, Peter Moor, which describes a soldier's 
experiences in the Herero campaign, and the somewhat 
notorious Holy Land, Clara Viebig has done some striking 
work in the social novel ; Those before the Gates shows the 
evil effect of suddenly-acquired wealth upon the simple 
country people who lived on the outskirts of Berlin during 
its industrial expansion, while The Sleeping Army is a capital 
study of the Polish question in its political and social aspects. 
We should mention, too, as characteristic of the age, the 
inartistic but widely-read novel of Bertha von Suttner, 
entitled Disarm, and its counterparts in the military novels 
of Beyerlein, Ompteda and Bloem. The Austrian story- 
writers, Ludwig Augengruber, Marie von Ebner-Eschen- 
bach, and Peter Rosegger, have added many delightful tales 
to the already almost too numerous array. In lyric poetry 
there is the same productivity, but only a few names, Detlev 
von Liliencron, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Richard Dehmel, 
stand out prominently. When we turn to the drama, we 
find at last in Gerhart Hauptmann an artist of originality, 
who goes his own way uninfluenced by the fashion of the 
moment. Of his early naturalistic work. The Weavers 
deserves most attention. It represents the revolt of the 
Silesian weavers in the hungry forties. Another striking 
play of Hauptmann's is The Sunken Bell, which takes us 
into the realm of fairyland and portrays somewhat vaguely 
but poetically the longings of the artistic mind. In 
comedies of lower life Hauptmann also excels, while his 
historical pieces and the novels which he has been writing 

N 



194 GERMAN CULTURE 



1 



lately are not so noteworthy. Hermann Sudermann 
Silesian like Hauptmann, began very promisingly in the 
drama with his problem plays Honour and Magda, but his 
more recent work has degenerated into sensationalism and 
mediocrity, which is redeemed only by the author's skill in 
technique. Apart from these dramatists there is no one of 
great importance. One or two of the less melodramatic 
historical plays of Wildenbruch may live. One might note, 
too, Fulda's comedy, The Talisman, and Halbe's Youth, an 
interesting drama on the problem of adolescence, and some- 
thing should be said of the works of the Austrian Hofmanns- 
thal. The Death of Titian and The Fool and Death, which, 
if not drama, are at least fine poetry. 

In all this period the most original and striking figure 
is Friedrich Nietzsche. His lyrics have already been 
mentioned, and, in addition to them, some of his prose 
works, especially Zarathustra, will live as literature. With 
the content of Nietzsche's works we have little to do. His 
English school of admirers take him very seriously as a 
philosopher, but there are very few thoughts in Nietzsche 
which are not simply negations of other people's thoughts, 
and in his whirlwind assaults upon literary shibboleths in 
particular it is questionable whether it is not rather the 
joy of combat than any very deep conviction that impels 
him. He is the despair of theologian and philosopher, 
for their defence is heavy artillery and Nietzsche is the 
elusive Parthian. But he wrote prose as no one in his 
time could do, and he broke into poetry spontaneously like 
one inspired. His iconoclasm, combined as it was with a 
far-reaching and optimistic idealism, made him the idol and 
model of many young authors. 

When we look back at the literature of the nineteenth 
century, we find no great writer of the mould of Goethe. 
On the other hand, there is a much larger number of men 
entitled to a place in the second rank. There are some 
spheres in which modern German literature is conspicuously 
weak — the epic in verse, comedy and humorous works. 



LITERATURE 195 

The poverty of comedy is especially noteworthy, and Ger- 
mans are well aware of their inferiority in this respect to 
the literature of France. We search the century in vain 
for a novelist who would rank with Scott or Dickens, but 
of good individual novels there are not a few. Many writers 
fail in this sphere through inability to construct, through 
pedantry, or a falling off of the interest of the plot. In 
the drama, again, there is perhaps no man of the very 
highest genius, like Schiller in the eighteenth century, but 
four writers like Kleist, Grillparzer, Hebbel, and Haupt- 
mann are a very fair harvest for one century. The best 
work, on the whole, has been done in the short story or 
Novelle and in the lyric. For the Novelle, which may be 
anything from twenty to a hundred or more pages in 
length, the Germans possess a quite unique talent. In 
lyric poetry, too, closely allied as it is to music, the genius 
of Germany has from the first found a very suitable vehicle 
of expression. In critical writings the nineteenth century 
is rather poor. No one has been able to take up the mantle 
of Lessing. In several cases the best biographies of dis- 
tinguished Germans have been written by foreigners. The 
learned German has two faults in particular — he fails to 
make the subject live, and he lacks the art to omit. The 
noteworthy difference between modern and classical German 
literature is this, that while literature in the eighteenth 
century is largely centred in Weimar, in the nineteenth, 
which has been an age of home or local art, nearly every 
single province of Germany is well represented. Above all, 
it was not till this century that North Germany had done 
anything almost in the literary field. But not only Ger- 
many — all German-speaking peoples have contributed 
richly. Lenau and Grillparzer in Austria, Keller and Meyer 
in Switzerland, are among the most original writers of the 
age. By the freshness of their outlook, subjects, and style 
they have done a very great deal to invigorate the literature 
of the Fatherland. 



GERMAN ART 

By G. BALDWIN BROWN, M.A. 

Professor of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh 

The arts of form in Germany pass through numerous 
phases between the fourth century and the twentieth, and 
at some periods and in certain aspects German art occupies 
a position of predominance, while at other epochs it is 
content with modest achievements on exotic rather than 
distinctly national lines. It may be noted at the outset 
that the qualities revealed in these phases of art are just 
the distinctive qualities of the German character that come 
out into prominence in other fields of activity. In some 
late mediaeval paintings in the Rhineland the intimacy and 
tenderness of German feeling is revealed without any lapse 
into that sentimentality upon which in real life it some- 
times verges, while the contrary quality of a hard, almost 
brutal, aggressiveness is distinctly in evidence in German 
painting of a somewhat later time. The early mediaeval 
architecture of Saxony and the Rhineland furnishes a 
splendid illustration of the national love of order and 
capacity for organisation. The subordination of the parts 
to the whole, and the intimate relation of part to part, 
make the German Romanesque minster the finest existing 
exponent of this phase of architecture, and there is no 
nobler monument of the national genius. The quality 
which more than any other has given Germany her proud 
position in the domain of the higher culture is intellectual 
depth, and this quality, that in more modem days lifted 
German philosophy and German music to their position of 
supremacy, found its outcome in the palmy days of German 

197 



198 GERMAN CULTURE 

painting in the profound and moving design of Albrecht 
Diirer. Diirer's work, however, like that of the German 
school of painting in general, is affected to its detriment 
by a tendency that has been noticed in other spheres of 
German activity — that is, over-insistence on detail, leading 
to a neglect of larger issues. This is the result of a con- 
scientiousness which gives the task of the moment absorbing 
interest, but, by chaining the mind to the trivial and acci- 
dental, may check its free range over the wider field. 

The history of German art begins with the appearance 
of the Teutonic peoples in force within the bounds of the 
Roman Empire, for the Germans who overran the provinces 
exhibited gifts in design that are genuinely national. The 
decorative art of this period, exhibited mainly in the 
ornamentation of arms and of personal trinkets, such as 
brooches, buckles, and the like, is based on Roman art, 
but shows a distinctively northern feeling in the use of 
fantastic animal forms, which a high authority in Sweden 
has prophesied " will always remain for all time a most 
characteristic expression of the German imagination." 
The term " German *' would at this period be used in a 
wide geographical sense. It would include the work of the 
Goths and Vandals in Eastern and Southern Europe and 
North Africa, that of the Lombards in Italy, the Burgun- 
dians and Franks in Gaul, and the Anglo-Saxons in England, 
as well as that of the Alamanni on the Rhine. 

In the time of Charles the Great the limits covered by 
the term are circumscribed, but if we regard Charles, an 
Austrasian Frank, as a German, we must extend these 
limits over the whole of his vast dominions. The divisions 
of the Empire after his death resulted in the emergence of 
a region corresponding more nearly to the Germany of after 
history, and for the purpose of this sketch we may regard 
as German the Rhineland and the Neckar region, with 
Saxony and Westphalia, as far north and west as the North 
Sea coast and as far east as the Elbe and Moldau, beyond 
which the Slav element in the population becomes pre- 



ART 199 

dominant. The metropolis of the whole region, so far as 
culture is concerned, is Cologne, but during the tenth cen- 
tury, the time of the Saxon emperors, the seats of the chief 
creative activities in the arts were farther to the east, in 
the towns and the monasteries of the region centring in 
the Harz. 

The favourite residences of Charles the Great were in 
the Rhineland, and here there existed in abundance the 
Roman monuments which inspired his successful efforts 
towards a classical renaissance. The art which resulted 
represented a mixed style in which antique elements, as 
well as elements drawn from Celtic culture introduced by 
immigrant Irish monks, mingled with the Germanic, and 
there was nothing here that can be regarded as characteris- 
tically national. A little later, however, when Saxony took 
the lead, the word '' German " begins to mean something 
far more distinctive, and from about 850 onwards to the 
beginning of the Gothic period in the middle of the twelfth 
century, Germany occupied what her writers would call a 
fuhrende Stellung, and was the European centre for the 
practice of architecture and all the decorative arts including 
the illumination of manuscripts. After about 1250 the 
centre was removed to France, where Gothic art arose and 
produced its most splendid achievements, while from about 
1300 onwards the place of prominence was assumed by 
Italy, and she resigned it in the first half of the seventeenth 
century to the Low Countries, after which, for the whole 
of the eighteenth, France was again in a position of un- 
questioned predominance. In the early mediaeval or 
Romanesque period, accordingly, the best art in Europe was 
to be found in Germany, while from 1250 to the end of the 
eighteenth century she held a position second to France, 
Italy, or the Netherlands. It must be stated, however, 
that in the fourteenth century, and again in the period 
shortly before and after 1500, though in the mass and the 
average quality of her artistic productions Italy was supreme, 
yet German artists of the early Cologne school, and later 



200 GERMAN CULTURE 

on, Diirer and Holbein, with others of individual genius, 
such as Matthias Griinewald, achieved independent master- 
pieces that take rank beside the best that Italy can show. 
Finally, from 1800 onwards, Germany, without in any branch 
markedly taking the lead, has played a worthy part in the 
various movements that have given life and variety to the 
artistic activities of the world of to-day. It must never, of 
course, be forgotten that from the middle of the eighteenth 
century onwards the artistic genius of Germany has ex- 
pressed itself in the world's masterpieces of the art of music. 
The Romanesque art of Germany represents a produc- 
tivity inspired by the purest aims and served with the most 
painstaking devotion. It was practised largely in monastic 
surroundings, and on this fact depend many of its charac- 
teristics. The monkish craftsman was actuated by purely 
religious motives, and as he had to prepare his own materials 
and appliances, and was precise and careful in the use of 
them, his work was as good in execution as in idea. A 
German artist-monk of about iioo a.d., who calls himself 
" Theophilus," has left us a technical treatise on artistic 
practice as it was understood in the cloister, and nothing 
ever written about art is more congenial to the spirit of 
the true artist in every age. The essential matter, in the 
eyes of Theophilus, was evidently the creation of beauty, 
without the intrusion of any direct theological or didactic 
purpose. He justifies the practice of art as a part of the 
religious life on the plea that man is thereby making effec- 
tive his pristine likeness to the Great Artist of the world, 
who had made everything beautiful in its season. The 
church was to be so adorned on wall and ceiling and in 
furniture and fittings that it would shine like the Garden of 
Paradise, and become a sort of microcosm of the vast work 
of the Creator of the universe. The outcome of this artistic 
activity of the cloister is to be seen in the churches and 
museums of German towns such as Hildesheim, the home 
in the eleventh century of the great monkish craftsman. 
Bishop Bemward. The style of this decorative work is, of 



ART 201 

course, weak in the human figure, but it uses ornamental 
motives with unerring tact. Animals, sometimes derived 
from those figured on Oriental textiles imported into the 
West, are freely employed, and the stock foliage motive is 
the classical acanthus that was brought into vogue at the 
Carolingian renaissance. Magnificent illuminated manu- 
scripts were prepared for the Carolingian and Saxon emperors 
and other notable personages, and these were bound in 
sumptuous covers on which is perpetuated the technique 
of incrusting gold with coloured stones that was popular 
in the earlier migration period. Chalices and pattens, 
censers, candlesticks, reliquaries, and innumerable other 
objects for the service of the sanctuary, exhibit the monkish 
craftsman's skill in the manipulation of cast and hammered 
metal, the setting of semi-precious stones, enamelling, 
niello-work, and the carving in relief of plaques of ivory. 

The style of this early mediaeval decorative design was 
so good largely for the reason that the predominant art of 
the time was architecture, and the decorative crafts have 
always been at their best when in the service of the mistress 
art. The earliest monuments of Germanic architecture are 
the tomb of Theodoric the Ostrogoth at Ravenna and the 
minster of Charles the Great at Aachen, and these are both 
formed on early Christian models supplied by Italy. The 
development in Germany of a national architecture may be 
held to start, not with an actual monument, but with one 
figured on the plan of St. Gall, a well-known document of 
about 8io A.D. We have here the project for a monastic 
church of the first rank as it was conceived of at the time, 
and we see that the Early Christian basilican scheme was 
growing into the cruciform plan common in the later Middle 
Ages by the addition not only of a transept, but of a prolonga- 
tion of the nave past the crossing, making the fourth arm 
of the cross. The plan gives evidence also that subsidiary 
altars were becoming multiplied in the larger churches, 
owing to the growth of an exaggerated reverence paid to 
relics. To accommodate a second important altar compar- 



202 GERMAN CULTURE 

able in honour to the original " high " altar of the church, 
a second apse has been added at the western end, corre- 
sponding to the original one at the east, and this double 
apse becomes a speciality of German Romanesque churches. 
It is in its way a defect in them, for it renders impossible 
that effective treatment of the entrance end of the church 
with its spreading portals between the twin towers of the 
fagade, which is the glory of the greater churches of France. 
A better result of the demand for the accommodation of 
multiplied altars was the addition of galleries over the side 
aisles affording space for these, a feature that becomes 
normal in German churches from the tenth century onwards. 

The plans, and also, by the addition of galleries and 
towers, the elevations internal and external of the churches, 
had become by the tenth century somewhat complicated, 
and now in the eleventh we find the Romanesque style 
consolidating itself through a logical and consistent treat- 
ment of these varied elements. 

It is because this logic and consistency are more pro- 
nounced in German Romanesque than in other examples 
of the round-arched style, that Romanesque architecture 
is recognised as belonging to Germany in the same sense in 
which Gothic belongs to France and the architecture of the 
Renaissance to Tuscany. The earliest existing monuments 
that present the style date from the close of the tenth or 
the beginning of the eleventh century. There may be 
mentioned Gemrode in the Harz, 960 ; St. Pantaleon, 
Cologne, 964-980 ; the Dom at Worms, 996 ; St. Michael, 
Hildesheim, looi ; the Dom at Mainz, 1009 ; that at Speyer, 
1030 (the dates given are those of the respective foundations), 
but in every case save that first mentioned the buildings owe 
their present character largely to the alterations or rebuild- 
ings of the twelfth century, from which period date the 
vaults. The outstanding features of the best monuments 
of the style may be briefly described as follows. The plan 
is cruciform, the nave and transept being made of equal 
widths, and the feeling for regularity and order inculcated 



ART 203 

in the predominant institution of the times, the monastery, 
expresses itself in the accurate spacing out of the interior 
by the multipUcation or subdivision of the square where 
nave and transept intersect. This square repeated towards 
the east forms the fourth arm of the cross, i.e. the chancel 
or choir preceding the apse, to north and south the tran- 
septs ; while the length of the nave is measured out by 
repeating the square westwards three or four times. The 
side aisles are made half the width of the nave, and are 
divided up into squares, each a fourth part of the size of the 
large square. In this way there is secured a proportionate 
division of the internal area which imparts a purposeful 
look to the whole, while this same division into squares 
reveals itself as of essential value at a subsequent date, when 
stone vaults, always in square bays and on the plan of the 
Roman intersecting vaults, come to be added. Another 
feature in these churches is also prophetic of vaulting, 
though introduced without any conscious reference to it. 
This is the alternation of supports {Stutzenwechsel) accord- 
ing to which solid piers come at the corners of the large 
squares while the intermediate supports along the arcade 
are of slighter make. The solid piers later on take the 
function of sustaining the main vaults of the nave, the 
intermediate piers serving for the vaults on the smaller 
squares of the aisles. In the interior elevations the openings 
of the gallery over the side aisles are made to compose effec- 
tively with the arcade below and the windows of the upper- 
most storey, while the columns that subdivide these openings, 
relieved against the shadowed spaces within the gallery, 
lighten the effect of massiveness which dominates the 
interior. 

A peculiarity of the plan is the correspondence of the 
two ends not only by the reduplication of the apse, but by 
the repetition of the transept, or transept and choir, at the 
western extremity. As the crossing is in each case covered 
with a pavilion or low tower, that is conspicuous in the 
external view, this arrangement gives the mass of the build- 



204 GERMAN CULTURE 



1 



ing, when seen from outside, a very symmetrical appearance,' 
in which it contrasts markedly with the mediaeval churches 
of France, England, or Italy. The grouping of the towers 
carries out this impression, as these are often placed in pairs 
flanking the eastern and western apses. It is at times not 
possible to tell by mere external inspection which is the altar 
and which the entrance end of the building, and this, which 
from one point of view may be regarded as a defect, as it 
conceals the purpose of the structure, has, on the other side, 
the advantage that it increases the air of completeness and 
regularity so characteristic of the style. 

No examples are better fitted to illustrate the special 
qualities of German Romanesque than two Rhineland 
churches, the Apostles Church at Cologne, and the Abbey 
Church at Laach, in the Eifel, a few miles inland from 
Andemach. The former, which reached its present form 
at the end of the twelfth century, is singularly dignified and 
impressive, especially in its interior aspect, and few can 
enter it without recognizing the power of fine style in archi- 
tecture to satisfy the aesthetic judgment, as a Greek temple 
satisfies it, with the sense of a great thought largely and 
harmoniously expressed. The latter church enjoys the rare 
distinction that it is a completely vaulted edifice begun and 
carried out on a consistent scheme in the space of about 
half a century, from 1093 to 1156, and for completeness 
there is no example of the style to compare with it. The 
scheme in the interior, though full of interest, is somewhat 
abnormal in the style, but the exterior gives us all the 
characteristics of German Romanesque at their best. The 
church is approached at the western end by an enclosed 
court or atrium of Early Christian form, into which projects 
the western apse. A western choir surmounted by a square 
tower, flanked to right and left by round towers with poly- 
gonal caps, produces an imposing composition for the 
entrance facade, while at the altar end the square western 
tower is repeated in a polygonal pavilion over the crossing, 
and the eastern choir is flanked by two square towers re- 



ART 205 

peating the effect of those at the west. The general impres- 
sion is one of a noble simpHcity in mass and composi- 
tion, while the detail is applied with a certain austere 
reticence that does not exclude richness. 

The architectural decoration of these fine Romanesque 
churches consists partly in carvings, in which occur the 
decorative motives already noticed, and partly in tectonic 
features, some of which are apparently of Italian origin. 
This last appHes to the dwarf galleries in which a series 
of round arches are supported on shght columns, and which 
are used to enliven the upper stages of external walls, 
especially in important situations such as the circuit of 
the apse. Italy is the home of the column, and these 
galleries that are common in the Lombard churches are 
probably derived from this source. On the other hand, 
the treatment of the wall with upright shallow pilasters, 
the so-called " Lisenen," though it occurs also in Lom- 
bardy, may be of native German origin as a derivation 
from the pilaster of classical Roman monuments. The 
towers, when circular, are crowned with conical caps, but 
the square ones end with the characteristic German " Helm," 
the four walls terminating in high-pitched gables, and a 
pyramidal roof being adjusted to them. 

Internally the chief form of decoration is the mural or 
ceiling painting. The fiat wooden roof of St. Michael, 
Hildesheim, exhibits an elaborate painted enrichment 
wherein a Tree of Jesse, bearing in conventional acanthus 
scrolls medallions containing portraits of the ancestors of 
Christ, intervenes between a picture of the Fall, in which 
the nudes of Adam and Eve are of notable excellence for 
the time, and a representation of the Annunciation, beyond 
which again at the altar end of the whole there appears a 
monumental figure of Christ enthroned. These central 
subjects that run from west to east are framed by a series 
of panels in which are figures of prophets who foretold the 
birth of Christ, and there are also two outer borders. " As 
a whole," Woltmann has said, " the ceiling forms one of 



206 GERMAN CULTURE 

the foremost examples of severe architectural arrangement 
and artistic distribution in the whole range of mediaeval 
painting. The principal figures rise to a noble dignity, the 
drawing is assured and light . . . the pure colouring," 
largely in the traditional mediaeval blue and red, " is har- 
monious and powerful." 

Of mural painting in the twelfth century several cycles 
survive, though, of course, rather drastically restored. The 
most extensive is the one in the choir and transept of the 
cathedral at Brunswick ; the most complete and interesting 
that in the ancient chapter-house of the now secularised 
monastery of Brauweiler near Cologne, where the subjects 
are drawn from the tenth chapter of Hebrews, and the 
victory of faith is displayed in the acts and personages of 
the Old Testament and of Early Christian times. The 
whole is a sermon in pictures of a very effective kind, and 
the figure drawing is for the date — about 1150 a.d. — astonish- 
ingly good. The small double church of Schwarz-Rheindorf, 
opposite Bonn, still of the twelfth century, contains a 
series from the prophecies of Ezechiel. Other ecclesiastical 
buildings in Cologne and its neighbourhood exhibit ex- 
tensive remains of mural paintings, but these are for the 
most part somewhat later, and betray the characteristics 
of the Gothic style which in the thirteenth centtuy made 
its entry into Germany. 

In architecture German Gothic is far from possessing 
the interest of German Romanesque. The latter, with its 
severe discipline and rational order, suited, as we have seen, 
the national temper, and was, moreover, a perfect ex- 
pression of the monastic spirit as this was displayed in the 
great conventual establishments. The expression was, in- 
deed, so full and free that at the time when, in the middle 
of the twelfth century, the Gothic spirit was beginning to 
assert itself in central France, Germany was so well supplied 
with magnifi.cent abbey churches in the round-arched style 
that there was Uttle place for others. In connection with 
this it may be noted that one reason for the rapid develop- 



ART 207 

merit of Gothic architecture in the He de France and 
Picardy in the twelfth century was the fact that this 
particular district of Europe had not been the seat of any 
notable building activity in the Romanesque period, so that 
the field was open for a new development. 

In Germany the thirteenth century was well advanced 
before the Gothic style obtained a footing in the country. 
One of the earliest of its monuments is the Cathedral of 
Magdeburg, which was in great part inspired by Laon ; and 
it is curious to find the style making its first appearance 
in Germany so far from the frontier of the land where it 
had its birth. In the Rhineland, which borders on France, 
the choir of St. Gereon at Cologne and the beautiful Lieb- 
frauenkirche at Trier — the latter with St. Elizabeth at 
Marburg, the first German church carried out consistently 
in the Gothic style — are original creations, French in their 
details, but in their general scheme independent of Gallic 
models. The interior of the Trier church, of a circular 
form strange to French Gothic, is of singular beauty. On 
the other hand, the Cathedral of Cologne is distinctly French 
in its general scheme, which is closely modelled on that of 
Amiens. The proportions of the edifice are so vast, and 
the height of its western spires, completed in 1880, so 
prodigious, that it will always be an imposing monument, 
but it is devoid of the charm and poetry of the French and 
English and Spanish churches. The style is formally pure, 
but produces a mechanical impression. 

Some of the later Gothic churches of the fourteenth 
century, such as St. Lorenz at Nuremberg, or St. Sebaldus 
at the same place, begun in the thirteenth century, are 
much more picturesque in their exteriors, and have besides, 
what is lacking at Cologne, a considerable display of decora- 
tive sculpture. Some of the best examples of this are on 
the famous Gothic fountain, the " Schone Brunnen " of 
the late thirteenth century. For Gothic sculpture in 
Germany, Nuremberg is only surpassed by Bamberg, where, 
in the so-called " Adam's Portal," there is the best display 



208 GERMAN CULTURE 

in the whole country. The master here was evidently in- 
spired from Rheims, and it needs hardly to be said that in 
this particular department neither Germany nor any other 
land has anything to show comparable with the display on 
French churches such as Rheims or Amiens. As a fact, 
the best architectural sculpture of the period in Germany is 
Gothic in date, but in style belongs still to the earlier 
Romanesque epoch. Such sculpture is to be found in 
Saxony in the interior of the church at Wechselburg and in 
the famous portal of the church at Freiberg in the Erzge- 
birge known as the " Golden Gate." This dates from about 
the second quarter of the thirteenth century, but so far 
as the architectural setting of the figures is concerned, and 
in certain characteristics of the figures themselves, the 
work is still Romanesque, and there is no trace in the 
former of the pointed arch nor in the latter of the lightness 
and grace of Gothic figures. The relation between the 
architecture and the figures is, however, so good that the 
whole has been pronounced the most perfect of mediaeval 
portals, for all Romanesque gates by its side look poor, all 
Gothic ones overladen with details. 

It is not to German architecture that we look for ex- 
pression in the forms of Gothic art. The spirit of that 
great movement found its outcome in Germany in a phase 
of the art of painting that is of much interest and beauty. 
German painting has already been noticed in the forms of 
manuscript illumination and of Romanesque wall and 
ceiling decoration. The churches of the same period were 
also well supplied with altar fronts and altar backs, shrines, 
reliquaries, screens, and the like, in which painted wooden 
panels found their place. In the fourteenth century, in 
more than one part of Germany, notably at Prague, 
Nuremberg, and Cologne, these panels received new im- 
portance, and became veritable pictures of independent 
value. This was notably the case with the productions of 
what is known as the School of Cologne, dating in the last 
part of the fourteenth and the first part of the succeeding 



ART 209 

century. In calling this work Gothic, it is meant that it is 
inspired by the same spirit that manifested itself in the 
French cathedrals from the middle of the twelfth century 
onwards. The spirit was one of grace, tenderness, and 
refinement, and was embodied characteristically in the 
figure of St. Louis of France. It is the same bright and 
winning temper that in Italy was incorporated in the 
person of Francis of Assisi, and that inspired the essentially 
Gothic art of Giotto and Andrea Pisano. Here in Germany 
this new movement in painting was connected with a 
religious revival led by the so-called '' Gottesfreunde," of 
whom Ekkehart and Tauler, both of whom preached in the 
Rhineland in the fourteenth century, were the most famous. 
They were mystics who sought in religion for a more 
intimate personal relation between man and God and 
suffused the whole being with ecstatic love. They were 
visionaries, and were visited by celestial apparitions, which, 
true to the spirit of the age, were always forms of 
beauty. The grotesque, the hideous, and the terrible, that 
at a later as at an earlier date held such fascination for 
the northern fancy, never haunted them, and only angelic 
shapes embosomed in flowers floated before their inward 
eyes. 

In close correspondence with the peculiar tone of re- 
ligious feeling thus indicated, we find at Cologne in the 
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries a school of painting 
remarkable for the beauty, tenderness, and quiet but 
intense religious feeling of its productions. 

Its chief activity in the latter part of the fourteenth 
century is popularly associated with the name of one 
Wilhelm of Herle, who is mei^tioned in contemporary 
documents as the best master in German lands. It is 
probably safe to ascribe, if not to him, at any rate to his 
successor, Herman Wynrich, and others of his school, the 
best pieces of the time, such as the '' Clara '' altar in the 
Cathedral at Cologne, or the '* Crucified with Attendant 
Saints '' and the " Madonna with the Bean Flower " in the 

o 



210 GERMAN CULTURE 

Museum there. The last is the best example of the schoolj 
for its idyllic charm and the grace and delicacy of desigr 
and execution. The Madonna with her round face and 
tiny mouth, and the Child that caresses her chin with its 
infant hand, might have been seen in a mystic vision of 
Heinrich Suso, the follower of Ekkehart and Tauler, and 
the same may be said of those sacred idylls in which the 
Madonna is pictured in a flower-garden attended by a bevy 
of angels engaged in music or in playful occupations. A 
Madonna with angels of this kind in the Town Museum 
at Frankfort is a classic example of the style. 

A " Crucifixion " with a large number of figures in the 
Museum at Cologne exhibits this same idyllic quality com- 
bined with certain other elements which for good or ill 
become characteristic of all the later German painting of 
the mediaeval period. These elements are more pronounced 
in the work of the chief German master of the second 
quarter of the fifteenth century, Stephan Lochner from 
Constanz, who settled in Cologne, and died there in 1452. 
In Albrecht Diirer's diary there is an often-quoted entry, 
'* Item, I paid two white pennies to see the picture which 
Master Stephan in Cologne had made." This picture, a 
triptych, is now preserved in the Cathedral, and presents 
the Madonna and Child adored by a large company of 
male and female saints. In two other works ascribed to 
Lochner, a large standing Madonna holding in the left hand 
a vetch, in the Archiepiscopal Museum at Cologne, and a 
Madonna with Angels making music in a rose-garden, in 
the Cologne Museum, the older purely idyllic feeling is 
combined with firmer drawing and more solid modelling 
than in the earlier works of the school, but in the Dombild 
there is associated with these qualities a pronounced realism 
in details, especially in costume, which is prophetic of 
tendencies that were to show themselves conspicuously in 
the future. Here, accordingly, will be a suitable place to 
pause for a moment to consider the qualities of the German 
painting of the period as a whole, before we go on to the 



ART 211 

work of Diirer and Holbein in which this phase of the 
national art finds its culmination. 

The development of this German school of the later 
Middle Ages was contemporary with that of the Italian 
schools south of the Alps, and as Italian characteristics are 
well known, they may be used to bring out by contrast 
those of the schools of the North. Meier-Graefe, in his 
study of Modern Art, has said that " the essential genius of 
German art expressed itself rather in design than in painting " 
... it ** is deficient in the pictorial instinct. The German 
is a musician, a poet, but not a painter.'' Support may 
certainly be found for this somewhat sweeping statement 
in the fact that in the seventeenth century German paint- 
ing passed almost wholly out of existence as a national 
art, while in Holland and Belgium the art developed on 
purely pictorial lines to the most splendid results. There 
were, as will be seen, external reasons for this, but all the 
same the fact does suggest that painting was not an art 
appealing specially to the aesthetic ambition of the Teuton. 
When German painting in the middle of the fifteenth 
century advances beyond these still primitive essays, its 
disadvantages and shortcomings, when compared with those 
of the art of Italy, are only too apparent. It was not, 
however, the fault of the German artist that his sense of 
beauty in the human form was not nourished like that of 
the Florentine on the remains and traditions of classical 
art, since opportunities for study of the kind were hardly 
available north of the Alps ; nor can we do anything but 
commiserate the Northerner when we contrast the opulent 
life of a city Kke Venice, full of mirth, light, and colour, 
or the court of a splendour-loving prince proud of the men 
of genius he maintained at his table, with the greyer and 
more homely surroundings of an inland German town. 
" Oh, how I shall freeze after this sunshine ! " writes Albrecht 
Diirer from Venice. '* Here I am a gentleman — at home 
only a parasite." 

In spite of these disadvantages, however, qualities were 



212 GERMAN CULTURE 

developed in the North that at times more than balance 
the fascinations of the alluring Italian style, though the 
merits in question are merits of design rather than dis- 
tinctively pictorial. Northern painting exhibits in some of 
its phases, as in the early Cologne pictures, a purity of 
religious emotion, an idyllic sweetness, and a devotional 
temper, which equal or even surpass anything found in 
Italy, but more constant qualities are dramatic force and 
intellectual profundity, that one would expect to find in 
the art of a people destined to such eminence in the higher 
music and in philosophy. German also, or rather, more 
generally, northern, is a delight in the grotesque and even 
the terrible, the impression of which the Northerner is fond 
of alleviating by a touch of humour. Precision of execution 
and conscientious adherence to truth in rendering of details 
is also a characteristic which the German national temper 
made almost inevitable. These last two groups of qualities 
are also the source of certain shortcomings in the German 
art of the period. The feeling for dramatic force and 
expressiveness leads to over-vehemence in actions and to 
forced facial expression amounting to grimace. A hard- 
ness, almost a brutality, of feeling seems here to be 
e\dnced. In the frequent scenes of martyrdom, for ex- 
ample, the features of executioners are shown as hideously 
distorted with passion. Again, the feeling for exactness 
in detail and delight in precise handling result too often 
in excess of elaboration in matters that are intrinsically 
unimportant, and to a hardness in the rendering of often 
meticulous accessories that destroys breadth and unity 
of effect and gives to compositions an unduly crowded 
appearance. 

In the painted and engraved work of Albrecht Diirer 
these characteristics of the art of his age and race come 
out into marked prominence. Diirer's intellectual depth, 
fertility of invention, and dramatic power, were freely 
recognised by the Italians of his day, and their appreciation 
of these qualities is shown by the fact that several of them, 



ART 218 

even Raphael himself, borrowed Diirer's designs for their 
own scriptural renderings. It is reported, however, of 
Michelangelo that, in conversation with Vittoria Colonna, 
he blamed the northern masters because, he said, '' They 
endeavour in one and the same picture to represent a mass 
of objects all with the same perfection, though one single 
one would in each case have been sufficient,'' and he went on 
to mention Diirer by name : "So true is this that even if 
Albert Diirer himself, a man of fine feeling and accomplished 
skill in his own fine, tries to deceive me with a work painted 
in imitation of the Italian style, I know as soon as my 
eye falls upon it that it has neither been painted in Italy 
nor by an Italian." A story is told to much the same 
effect about a conversation between Titian and some 
German visitors to Venice. It is very noteworthy that in 
later life Diirer became conscious of this shortcoming that 
he shared with his school, and told a friend that, as a young 
man, he had been fond of pictures full of variety and 
crowded with figures, and in the case of his own works 
had alwa37S looked to the many-sidedness of a piece. In 
later life, however, he had begun to observe nature and to 
portray it in its essential aspect {nativa fades), and had 
come to see that it was this simplicity which was the highest 
charm of art. Hence it followed that he no longer looked 
at his early pictures with satisfaction, but rather with a 
sense of his own deficiencies. 

In Diirer's life and work German art culminates. Serious 
and thoughtful in disposition, firm, precise, and self-reliant 
in every act and word, he has left us a body of work, 
painted, engraved, and in the form of drawings, that repre- 
sents the German school at its best, both in the quality of 
philosophical depth and in thoroughness and perfection of 
execution. Many of his best paintings, such as the marvel- 
lous " Adoration of the Trinity " at Vienna, or the *' Magi " 
at the Uffizi, are amenable to the criticism of Michelangelo 
and Titian, but in the small " Christ on the Cross " at 
Dresden, and the monumental " Four Apostles " at Munich, 



214 GERMAN CULTURE 

his characteristic qualities are virtues without their corre- 
sponding faults. Of the former " gem '' Crowe and Caval- 
caselle write : " The flesh is treated with a soft blending 
and with a firmness of touch and richness of enamel almost 
unrivalled ; and such is the minuteness of the detail that we 
can see the hairs on the frame and the reflection in the 
eyes " ; but they also pay it a tribute from the highest 
possible artistic standpoint in the words, " For proportion, 
power, life, and noble character, this exquisite piece rivals 
the creations of Leonardo da Vinci/' The famous figure 
of St. Paul in the " Four Apostles," his latest picture, is 
conceived with a breadth and grandeur not surpassed by 
any Italian master of the sixteenth century. It is the 
design of Masaccio with the added qualities due to a century 
of technical advance. 

With the public in general Diirer's fame rests rather on 
his engraved work than on his pictures. A word is neces- 
sary on the engraver's art, so important in Germany. Diirer 
employed the two media that have always been in most 
common use, the wood block and the copper plate. It 
needs hardly to be said that wood blocks were cut and de- 
signs incised on plates of copper or bronze long before there 
was any idea of making what we call a *' print." For the 
print in the modern sense what was needed before all things 
was paper. Now the manufacture of paper depended on 
the supply of linen rags, and the general use of body linen 
was a fashion of the fourteenth century. When linen was 
commonly worn and in due time reduced to the condition 
of rags, paper-mills came to be established in large numbers, 
and this was the case in the latter half of that century. 
For copper-plate printing, where the ink has to be drawn 
out from the incised grooves by the softened paper pressed 
into them, a special quality of ink was necessary, and this 
agam was not supplied till the same epoch. Wood blocks 
had been in use in earlier centuries for the printing of designs 
on textiles, and when sheets of paper became available it 
was a simple matter to print by the same process on these, 



ART 215 

the wood block for the textile prints being necessarily cut 
in reverse. The earlier engraved copper or bronze plate, 
on the other hand, was a positive — that is, the design was 
incised on it to show as it was, the lines for greater clearness 
being often, though not always, filled in with a black com- 
position (niello-work). If such a plate were prepared for 
printing, it would need to be made as a negative, with all 
the design in reverse, and this introduced a difficulty not 
present in the case of the wood block, the result being that 
the woodcut appeared sooner as an artistic product than 
the copper-plate print. By the middle of the fifteenth cen- 
tury, however, both were in use. 

It has often been discussed whether the invention of 
engraving was due to Italy or Germany, and no absolute 
certainty on the matter is to be obtained. Germany, 
however, was the first home of printing, and, as engraving 
and printing are arts closely allied, priority in the former 
also probably belongs north of the Alps. In the Germany 
of the fifteenth century the art of engraving rapidly assumed 
great importance, partly because of its connection with 
printing, and also to a great extent owing to the altered 
religious and social condition of the country. The Re- 
formation represented an emancipation of the human 
intellect, and produced activity of thought with a thirst 
for knowledge; the Bible was printed and read in the 
vernacular ; a controversial literature sprang up. All this 
created a demand, or at any rate prepaied a place, for a 
readily-accessible form of art appealing to the people at 
large, and this was supplied by the copper-plate print or 
the woodcut, introduced as illustrative matter into the 
Bible or other printed books, or sold apart as was the habit 
with Albrecht Diirer. Holbein's early work at Basel was 
largely for the illustration and adornment of books. Diirer 
was preceded, surrounded, and followed by masters who 
practised the art either exclusively or side by side with 
painting, and among these it is only necessary to mention 
a few names such as those of Martin Schongauer, Hans 



216 GERMAN CULTURE 

Burgkmair the elder, Georg Penz, Hans Sebald Beham 
1500-1550, and a little later Virgil Solis, the best Germa: 
engraver of ornament of the sixteenth century. 

The number of Diirer's engravings is greater than that 
of his paintings, and there can only be mentioned here, 
inter alia, his four series from the Passion of Christ, and the 
large woodcuts from the Apocalypse and from the Life of 
Mary, to which must be added the considerable number of 
his separate plates. Besides the engravings and pictures, 
Diirer's drawings and water-colours afford material for pro- 
longed study. 

A glance at five of Diirer's more important copper-plate 
engravings will suffice to exhibit some of the characteristics 
of his style. We may select the " Greater Fortune '* of 
about 1500, the '' Adam and Eve " of 1504, and the three 
plates, probably intended for a series illustrating the " Four 
Temperaments,*' the *' St. Jerome in his Cell,'' the " Knight 
and Death," and the '' Melancholia," of 1513-1514. In 
the first plate we have the combination of a realistic render- 
ing, uncompromising in its ugliness, of the female nude as 
presented by a powerful but coarsely-moulded German 
model, with the most exquisite delicacy of artistic touch on 
the magnificent wings of the figure, where the feathers are 
indicated as only Diirer's graver could show them. In 
contrast to this essentially northern creation, we find in the 
" Adam and Eve," together with the same perfection in 
detail, a distinct effort to achieve formal beauty in the nude 
form, male and female, and we are reminded that Diirer 
very early in his career came under Italian influence, and 
was in this way brought into contact with the classical ideas 
of beauty. In the paintings of '' Adam " and *' Eve," in 
the Pitti at Florence and at Madrid, he w^nt still farther 
in his concession to the ideal of formal beauty as it was 
understood south of the Alps, and in comparison with so 
much that he has left of more distinctly northern character 
these exceptional pieces are elements of much interest in 
his worki 






ART 217 

Of the three other plates, the '' St. Jerome in his Cell '' 
represents the " lymphatic '' temperament, and there is a 
delightful warmth of true German Gemuthlichkeit in 
the pleasant, homelike interior filled with sunlight, where 
the lion and a pet dog are dozing together on the floor. 
The " Knight " in the familiar plate, mounted on a magni- 
ficent charger inspired by the horse of the CoUeoni monu- 
ment at Venice, is the type of the '' sanguine '' temper, 
while the name " Melencolia," inscribed on the third plate 
with the number " I,'' sufficiently indicates its theme. No 
work of art is better known or has given rise to more com- 
ments. It is universally recognised as charged with that 
profundity of meaning which is characteristic of the greater 
productions of the genius of the North. What is the inten- 
tion, however, of this female genius of superb mould, heavily 
robed, oak crowned, and equipped with wings as finely 
rendered as those of the " Greater Fortune " herself ; who 
rests her head upon her hand with an expression of brooding 
sadness ? Of what significance in relation to her position 
and mood are all those tools and appliances of work with 
which she is encompassed ? Do the comet and the rainbow 
in the sky convey any hint of the artist's thought ? Among 
the appliances just mentioned there appears above the head 
of the genius an abacus or board with rows of numerals 
across it. A discovery made in connection with these last 
has given a key to the piece. The numbers appear to 
indicate the date of the death of the artist's mother, to whom, 
as a man of strong family affection, he was tenderly attached. 
Diirer himself was above all things the craftsman, delight- 
ing in the use of tools which he guided by that inimitable 
hand of which a contemporary said that '' Nothing more 
fine could be seen." His mind was as fertile in the inven- 
tion of motives as his fingers were skilful in carrying them 
out ; and the intention of the " Melancholia " is, no doubt, 
the portrayal of the mood of the indefatigable creator on 
whom has come a paralysing sorrow, and who pauses in the 
midst of a productive activity to ask himself what is the good 



218 GERMAN CULTURE 

of it all, since there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, 
nor wisdom in the grave where the loved one now rests, and 
whither all must come. 

In his artistic equipment, as well as in his career, Hans 
Holbein, 1497-1543, differs markedly from his elder con- 
temporary, Diirer. He was the son of an excellent painter 
of Augsburg, a town which rivalled Nuremberg in culture 
and surpassed it in wealth and commercial importance, but 
his life was spent elsewhere than in his native city, and we 
find him first in Basel and Luzern, and then for the greater 
part of his later life in London, where from 1532 to 1543 
he was highly esteemed, holding the post of court painter 
to Henry VHL In philosophic depth he was not Diirer's 
equal, but he possessed a quality to which the serious mind 
of Albrecht never aspired or descended, the quality of 
humour, which found its outcome in satiric drawings and 
prints. He used this power in the religious controversies 
of the time, and whereas Diirer, though an enthusiastic 
admirer of Martin Luther, remained in religion as in art a 
mediaevalist, Holbein openly employed his talents in 
the service of Protestantism. In his famous series of 
woodcuts on the traditional German theme of the 
intrusion of Death into all the relations of himian life, 
he is scathing in his satire on Pope and Cardinal, 
on Abbot, Monk, and Nun, but treats the secular clergy, 
the clergy of Protestantism, with respect and sympathy. 
His artistic repertory also differed from Diirer's in that he 
was a child of the Renaissance, and one of his early works 
was the decoration of the f agade of a house in Luzern with 
figures and ornaments of the Renaissance type. In his 
designs for title-pages and the like and for decorative 
work in general, he uses only the newly-revived classical 
motives. 

One picture, a large votive piece on traditional ecclesi- 
astical lines, in ducal ownership at Darmstadt, represents 
the Cathohc Burgomaster of Basel, Jacob Mayer, with his 
family, adoring the Madonna, and this is the most in^- 



ART 219 

port ant picture painted in the mediaeval style in the German 
school. Holbein's fame rests, however, chiefly on his in- 
comparable series of portraits, a form of art of a more 
distinctively modern type. No doubt, from the point of 
view of the seventeenth century, Holbein's painting, like that 
of Diirer, is still archaic, but success in portraiture depends 
not only on technical qualities in brushwork, but on the 
power of analysing human character and of conveying the 
truth of it with force and fullness under the form of beauty. 
So envisaged, Holbein stands in the very foremost rank, and 
yields place to none of the very greatest masters of the art. 
In his best work he combines a feeling for breadth in the 
treatment of his heads, with the old German delight in the 
detail of accessories, and in that form of portraiture in 
which the figure appears in appropriate surroundings, Hol- 
bein is pre-eminent. Nothing from his brush surpasses the 
portrait at Berlin of the German merchant in London, 
Georg Gyze, one of his later works. The merchant, richly 
attired, is at the table in his office, and the face is modelled 
in cool light, the character being given by the firm outlines 
round the features and the self-reliant expression in the 
eyes that are turned in the direction of the spectator. The 
table, covered with a richly-coloured Oriental cloth, and the 
shelves round the wood-lined walls, are furnished with office 
impedimenta — seals, inkstand, cash-box, ledger, string-holder, 
and the like — with parchments and letters galore, all precise 
in detail as in a photograph, but so artistically treated that 
they clothe the figure without in the least detracting from 
its pre-eminence. A note of beauty, which illustrates the 
pictorial side of Holbein's genius, is furnished by a Venetian 
glass vase on the corner of the table, in which are some 
sprays of carnation, the rendering of which, in its combina- 
tion of softness and fluidity with decision, is sufficient of 
itself to prove the artist a true painter, as well as an un- 
surpassed master of delineation. Holbein's drawings for 
his portraits in oil, many of which are at Windsor and in 
other British collections, depend for their effect on his use 



220 GERMAN CULTURE 

of a firm but sensitive and expressive line, of which artistic 
medium he was perhaps the greatest master that the 
history of the graphic art reveals. 

In many parts of Germany, before and after Diirer and 
Holbein, as well as during their lifetime, there were painters 
of suJffiLcient eminence to deserve a word. The interval 
between the Cologne School and Diirer is filled by the 
notable figure of Martin Schongauer of Colmar, c, 1445- 
149 1, productive as an engraver and the author also of one 
or two excellent oil paintings. A life-sized Madonna and 
Child in a rose arbour at Colmar has much of the tenderness 
of the Cologne masters, while in many of the master's prints 
there is the vehemence in action and expression, the leaning 
towards the grotesque and terrible, that we have seen to 
be characteristic of the German design of the period. After 
the two great masters, the German painter of most pro- 
nounced genius was the Rhinelander, Matthias Griinewald, 
who died about 1530. He was an imaginative artist, a 
mystic like the older men of his district, but in his visions 
there mingled with sights of beauty sights of terror. Woer- 
mann writes of his soft melting effects of light and shade 
full of poetical suggestion, and of his emotional design with 
its passion and religious intensity. Other painters and 
engravers carry on their art in different parts of Germany, 
and among them may be mentioned Hans Baldung Grien, 
Lukas Cranach the elder, Heinrich Aldegrever, and Bar- 
tholomaus Bruyn of Cologne, 1493-1555, a painter of 
portraits whose work is of interest as prefiguring the broad 
but naturalistic productions of the Dutch portraitists of a 
later time. There is among them, how^ever, no sign of 
advance, and indeed the painting of the second half of the 
sixteenth century rapidly loses its national character, and, 
as in the case with the work of the master last mentioned, 
goes off into that imitation of Italian models already in 
fashion in Flanders. German artists, too, have now taken 
to leave their own country, as Holbein left it, and to seek 
their fortunes in other lands. At the very end of the 



» 



ART 221 

century, however, the German note is struck once more 
with remarkable effect. 

About the year 1600 there appeared at Rome a Frank- 
fort painter, Adam Elsheimer, moulded on influences de- 
rived from Griinewald, who had migrated to Italy, but had 
brought with him some of the distinctive qualities of his 
native art. He painted small pictures exquisitely finished, 
in which magical effects of light and shade seem to pre- 
figure Rembrandt, and, disposing his figures in a landscape 
setting fully as important as the figures themselves, he 
infused into his works a homely, intimate feeling that arrested 
attention. The Italians, accustomed at the time to empty 
and pretentious productions of the academic schools, were 
fascinated by the direct appeal of these simple but assured 
northern designs, and Elsheimer is as notable in bringing 
out the contrast between German and Italian work as in 
exhibiting in his own person the fact that painting had 
ceased for a time to be productive on German soil. It is a 
fact that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
the history of painting in Germany is almost a blank. The 
native artists who worked there were quite of the third rank, 
and the home commissions were largely in the hands of 
foreigners from Holland or from Italy, while the better 
German artists, like Elsheimer, lived abroad. Sir Peter 
Lely, from Soest in Westphalia, Sir Godfrey Kneller, from 
Liibeck, will occur to the British reader, as they both 
worked in England in this period. Raphael Mengs was the 
most notable German painter of the eighteenth century, 
and his sphere of activity was Italy and Spain. Only 
at the end of that century does a genuinely German 
artist make his appearance once more, and characteristic- 
ally enough, he was an engraver rather than a painter. The 
reference is to Daniel Chodowiecki, 1726-1809, who has 
been described as '' the first independent and nationally- 
minded German artist of the modem age." The beginning 
of the nineteenth century marks the opening of this 
modern age, of which notice will subsequently be taken. 



DUsI 

indll 



222 GERMAN CULTURE 

The eclipse here noted has been explained by the im-^ 
poverishment of the country owing partly to the religioi 
disturbances and partly to the alteration in the routes and 
emporia of commerce through the opening up of trans- 
oceanic waterways; by the loss of the old ecclesiasticsJ 
patronage in Protestant lands, and, above all, by the« 
Thirty Years War. It does not follow, however, that all 
artistic activity was at a standstill. Architectmre and 
architectural decoration passed through well-marked phases 
exemplified in numerous mommients throughout the length 
and breadth of the land. The division into so many quasi- 
independent states was in its way in favour of art, for each 
petty princeling had his capital and his " Residenz,'' which 
he desired to make a conspicuous centre, and there was a 
rivalry in forming galleries of works of painting and sculp- 
ture, and in the encouragement of artistic manufactures, 
such as the porcelain at Meissen near Dresden. In the 
Catholic South the counter-reformation, largely under the 
influence of the Jesuits, led to fresh demands in building and 
decoration. All this patronage, however, had little in- 
fluence on the country, for the demands were met largely 
by the work of foreigners, and the style and models in 
vogue were not German, but Italian, French, or Flemish. 
Frederick the Great favoured French fashions in art, and 
his acquisition of many of the masterpieces of Watteau is a 
significant fact of the times. A brief notice of the archi- 
tecture and decoration of these centuries will be all that 
is necessary. 

If Diirer, as we have seen, be still mediaeval, while Hol- 
bein, his junior by a quarter of a century, is thoroughly 
imbued with the spirit of the Renaissance, we can fix an 
approximate date for the coming in of the Italian style, 
which shows itself in some extant works of the early part 
of the sixteenth century. In the domain of sculpture the 
new influence makes itself felt especially at Nuremberg, and 
in a series of works partly in wood and partly in stone and 
bronze by the masters Veit Stoss, 1438-1533, and Adam 



ART 223 

Kraft, c. 1445-1509, we can trace the mingling of late 
Gothic and Renaissance elements, and can witness the 
victory of the latter in the bronze work of Peter Vischer 
the elder, who died in 1529. The series of reliefs in stone 
of the Stations of the Cross at Nuremberg, by Adam Kraft, 
have made visitors to that city familiar with the dramatic 
force and quaint realism of this last of the mediaeval 
sculptors of his country. The well-known Shrine of St. 
Sebaldus in the church of that name at Nuremberg, the 
work of Peter Vischer and his sons, is an elaborate pro- 
duction of bronze casting in which Gothic reminiscences 
combine with figure work and ornaments of a distinctively 
Renaissance type. A comparison has often been made 
between this work and the Ghiberti Gates at Florence of 
nearly a century earlier, and the monument, which was 
finished in 1519, is one of the very finest single works of 
art that Germany has produced. Vischer's noble bronze 
statues of King Arthur and Theodoric for the tomb of 
Maximilian I at Innsbruck are works of greater pretension 
still, for they are over life-size and exhibit a classical ease of 
pose with admirable technical execution. A large number 
of less important funeral monuments issued also from the 
prolific bronze foundry of the Vischer family and are to be 
seen in different parts of Germany. 

In architecture the German Renaissance is well repre- 
sented in the finely-proportioned and graceful porch of the 
Rathaus at Cologne of 1569, and in the more imposing 
monuments of the Jesuit Church of St. Michael at Munich, 
and the two blocks of the castle buildings at Heidelberg 
that meet at right angles in the north-east corner of the 
whole complexus, and date from 1544 to 1559. The com- 
paratively pure Renaissance forms seen best in the Cologne 
building soon, however, give place to those of a fuller, looser, 
more fantastic kind, which characterise the style known in 
Germany as " Barock.'' In this style the ornament has 
burst the bonds that kept it in due subordination to struc- 
ture, and has laid violent hands on the whole which it 



224 GERMAN CULTURE 

proceeds to dominate. Volutes, cartouches, and other inor- 
ganic forms are substituted for the orthodox classical 
details, though the general forms of the Italian Renaissance 
are still preserved. The '' Friedrichsbau " of the Heidel- 
berg Castle, 1601-1607, is a good example of the style in its 
more dignified aspect, while the side elevation of Liider of 
Bentheim's Rathaus at Bremen exhibits it in its freer and 
more fanciful vein. The '' Barock '* style partly corre- 
sponds to that of Louis XIV in France, and it is followed in 
Germany by the lighter, more graceful, but at the same 
time frivolous style known as " Rokoko/' or, to use French 
nomenclature, the style Louis XV. A building that ex- 
hibits the wayward grace of the Rokoko, though it precedes 
the appearance of this style and is really Barock, is Pop- 
pelmann's attractive " Zwinger " at Dresden, completed in 
1722. This is an arrangement of pavilions connected by 
galleries enclosing a space laid out for festal uses, and is 
one of the most charming architectural morsels presented 
to the public in modern times. Numerous buildings, 
public and private, of less pretension represent the later 
Rokoko style of the eighteenth century, as well as the so- 
called *' Zopf " style which succeeded it and corresponds to 
what we term the style Louis XVI. Potsdam is specially 
well supplied with examples. 

It must not be supposed, however, that these fanciful 
styles entirely dominated German architecture between 
1600 and 1800. A classical style of far greater simplicity 
and dignity is represented at Berlin by that singularly 
noble edifice, the Zeughaus or Arsenal. It was finished in 
1706, and it owes not a little of its aesthetic charm to the 
sculptured decoration due to the genius of Andreas Schliiter, 
1664-17 14. The masks of dying warriors round the inner 
court are among the most famous works of the kind, but the 
extensive groups and figures of a military order on the upper 
part of the fagade are equally expressive and are most 
happy in their decorative effect. Schliiter is responsible as 
architect for the main fagades of the royal Schloss at Berlin, 



ART 225 

though his fame is better supported by the fine equestrian 
statue on its effective pedestal of the Great Elector, which 
stands opposite to it. 

It was stated at the outset that Germany had borne her 
part in the various artistic movements that marked the 
nineteenth century, and she is at present conscientiously 
endeavouring to assimilate the highly-spiced food offered 
in the twentieth by " TArt Nouveau '' in architecture and 
decoration, and by the Italian Futurists and their like in 
connection with the long-suffering art of painting. In no 
important department, save perhaps that of monumental 
wall painting in fresco, can Germany be said to have taken 
the lead, though in the latest phase of religious art, the 
naturalistic rendering of the scenes of the sacred story, the 
work of Fitz von Uhde may claim a position of importance. 
For the rest, the country has in the main followed the 
fashions of the hour, answering in the early part of the 
century to the impulse of the classical and the romantic 
revivals, acquiescing for long periods in domestic architec- 
ture and decoration of a mid-Victorian dullness, awakening 
nearer our own time to the stimulus of impressionism in 
painting and sculpture, and making a distinct mark in the 
essentially modern art of illustrated journalism. The 
invention by Senefelder in 1798 of the process of lithography 
stands to the credit of Germany. 

In architecture the severity of classicism in Hamilton's 
High School at Edinburgh, and its modified expression in 
St. George's Hall, Liverpool, have been matched in the one 
case by von Klenze's Propulsea at Munich and his Walhalla 
above the Danube, in the other by SchinkeFs Old Museum 
and Royal Theatre House at Berlin ; but the Gothic revival, 
on the other hand, was much less conspicuous in Germany 
than among ourselves. During the middle part and the 
second half of the nineteenth century the dominant ecclecti- 
cism has prevailed there as in other lands, and some fine 
Renaissance buildings, such as Semper's Opera House and 
Picture Gallery at Dresden and Neureuther's Academy of 

p 



I< 



226 GERMAN CULTURE 

Arts at Munich, can be mentioned. In domestic architect 
ture the period produced very feeble results, and the un- 
successful Maximiliansstrasse at Munich may be quoted as 
an example. After the war of 1870-1871 there was great 
activity in building, but the majority of the domestic and 
semi-public structures, in a pretentious Renaissance styL 
with bad detail, are most unpleasing. Those in the Cologne 
" Ring,'' the line of the older fortifications, are particularly 
distasteful, and among momunental buildings the new Don» 
at Berlin, which with the western end of the Cathedral ati 
Cologne may be regarded as a votive offering for the victory 
over France, is one of the most oppressively Philistine 
structures with which the earth was ever weighted. In 
more recent years the revival in domestic architecture, 
which in England owes so much to the genius of Norman 
Shaw, has spread to Germany, and the small country house 
or suburban villa may be seen now represented in some 
parts in simple and pleasing artistic forms. Of greater 
importance is the real originality and power shown in urban 
structures in Berlin by the late Alfred Messel, whose monu- 
mental edifice for the great Wertheim emporium in the 
Leipziger Strasse is one of the most promising signs of 
genuine renewal of life in modern street architecture. 

In the department of sculpture a modified classical style 
was represented early in the century by Gottfried Schadow, 
whose chief pupil. Christian Ranch, 1777-1857, was the 
artist of the admirable memorial to Frederick the Great at 
the foot of Unter den Linden in Berlin, one of the best 
works of the kind in the modern age. Several vast monu- 
ments of a somewhat obtrusively patriotic kind appeal to 
pride in the Fatherland. The example set in 1848 by 
Schwanthaler's gigantic '* Bavaria '' in front of Klenze's 
Ruhmeshalle in Munich has been followed in the *' Ger- 
mania " overlooking the Rhine, and the " Hermann " on 
the Teutoburger Wald, both erected a few years after the 
Franco-Prussian War. The glorification of the Hohen- 
zoUems in the notorious Siegesallee in the Thiergarten at 



ART 227 

Berlin is recognised by the Germans themselves as an 
artistic mistake. 

Far more intimate in its appeal to modern feeling is the 
work of some of the more recent sculptors, of whom Adolf 
Hildebrand of Munich is typical. Of the numerous monu- 
ments to Prince Bismarck in Germany Hildebrand's eques- 
trian statue at Bremen in its simplicity and strength is 
quite the best, and in many of their works these sculptors 
strike the mean between severe monumentality and the 
picturesque style, which the influence of the art of painting 
in its recent developments renders increasingly attractive 
to the public. As a bold exposition of this style in its 
extremest manifestations the much-talked-of Beethoven 
monument by Max Klinger in Leipzig claims a word. The 
nude marble figure of the creator of the Choral Symphony 
with figured mantle over his knees is seated on a fantastic 
throne covered with symboUc enrichment, and the effect 
of the abundant detail is enhanced by a bold polychromy. 
Dr. Woermann pronounces it to be at any rate *' one of the 
most independent and expressive creations of the German 
art of the nineteenth century." 

German painting in the nineteenth century was in- 
fluenced by the romantic and classical revivals, and had as a 
moving impulse the new stir of national life due to the 
heroic struggle against Napoleon. An early phase of it is 
specially interesting to us in this country, as it preceded 
on similar lines our own pre-Raffaelite movement. 

In the early years of the century a small company of 
young German painters settled at Rome in an abandoned 
monastery, where they sought to reconstitute the life and 
work of the painters of the earlier religious schools. The 
name " Nazarene '' was applied to them in bantering 
fashion, and the most characteristic figure was that of 
Friedrich Overbeck, 1789-1869. A devoted adherent of the 
Roman Catholic Church, he was intensely religious, and his 
pictures breathe the same spirit of quiet and retiring piety 
that marks the early school of Cologne. " Art is to me," 



228 GERMAN CULTURE 

he wrote once, " a harp on which I would fain hear always 
sounding hymns to the praise of the Lord/' The *' Naza- 
renes " were romanticists of the type that surrenders itself 
to idealism, but recognises no attraction in nature and the 
things of the real world. Hence their art drew its motives 
at second hand from the works of the older masters. This 
secured a certain look of style in the compositions; but, 
on the other hand, the figures lacked individual character, 
and the colouring was pale, flat, and conventional. One 
good piece of work, however, the enthusiasts accomplished 
early in their career, which laid the art of their country under 
a considerable obligation. In 1815 they re-introduced the 
technique of fresco-painting, which had been abandoned since 
the death of Raphael Mengs in 1779, and, with the aid of 
one of Mengs' s old journeymen, executed successfully in the 
true process a series of paintings in a room of the Casa 
Bartholdy on the Pincian at Rome. These paintings, from 
the story of Joseph, have been skilfully removed to the 
National Gallery at Berhn, where they are now in a 
good state of preservation. Modern German wall-painting, 
which has flourished through the century, had here its 
origin. 

One of the chief representatives of this form of art was 
Peter Cornelius, who left the '' Nazarenes '' to become an im- 
portant figure in the German painting in the first half of 
the century, and with him may be placed Schnorr von 
Carolsfeld and Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Vast areas of 
wall and roof in public buildings in Munich, Berlin, and other 
towns were covered with fresco paintings, some of classical, 
others of historical and romantic import, but the work on 
the whole is cold and '' academic," and has generally been 
regarded even by the Germans themselves with more respect 
than affection. The work in general bears out what was 
said above about the non-pictorial character of Gennan 
graphic art. Cornelius and von Kaulbach were designers 
rather than painters, and the same applies to other notable 
men of the period, such as Carstens, the earliest of the 



ART 229 

modern school, 1754-1798, Moritz von Schwind, 1804-1871, 
and Genelli, while the later Adolf Menzel, 1815-1905, will 
probably live more by his illustrations than his pictures. 
The one painter of genius, who illumined his frescoes with 
the fire of art, was Alfred Rethel, 1816-1859, whose cycle 
from the life of Charles the Great, at Aachen, should be 
studied by all those who have been impressed by the artist's 
power in his well-known prints from the Dance of Death, 
wherein he gives a new and noble expression to an ancient 
German theme. He was a pupil of W. von Schadow, one of 
the '' Nazarenes,*' who was, after Cornelius, the founder of the 
Diisseldorf School that flourished in the middle part of the 
nineteenth century. Another of von Schadow's pupils, 
Anselm Feuerbach, 1829-1889, presented classical scenes in 
a poetic dress, and is one of the few German painters of the 
period on whose works the artist of to-day looks with 
delight. 

In the second half of the century the pictorial movement 
inspired by the French romanticists has been predominant 
over the academic orthodoxy of painters like Karl von 
Piloty of Munich, and names such as those of Hans von 
Marees, Hans Thoma, and Max Liebermann, who intro- 
duced to his countrymen the saner form of French impres- 
sionism, may be quoted from among a number too numerous 
to mention. The most popular artist of this " Richtung " 
is undoubtedly the Swiss painter, Arnold Bocklin, 1827-1901, 
whose romanticism, at times a little forced and self-conscious, 
has won for him a remarkable vogue. He is at any rate a 
painter, and his uncertainty in the matter of form, especially 
in the human figure, is veiled by a magic of colouring, 
especially in blues, and an execution that aims at a melting 
suggestive effect. 

A final word is due to the contribution from the side of 
Germany to a form of religious art which aims at verisimi- 
litude in the pictorial representation of the life of Christ by 
the abandonment of academic tradition and the use of local 
types, costumes, accessories, and setting. One form in 



* 



230 GERMAN CULTURE 

which this has been essayed, both in France and in Great 
Britain, is the elaboration of an Oriental mise-en-scene from 
a study of the Palestine of to-day. An experiment of a 
different kind was made by the German painter, Eduard 
von Gebhardt, whose '' Last Supper," of 1870, is well known 
from reproductions. Here the scene is set in the Germany 
of the fifteenth century, for which in the nineteenth there 
seems hardly sufficient reason. More recently Fritz von 
Uhde has gone back to the fashion of Rembrandt, and, 
taking the actual scenes in town or country of the Ger- 
many of his own day, imagines Christ introduced into them, 
and dealing with those He meets as He dealt with His 
fellow-coimtrymen in Palestine. " Suffer Little Children to 
come imto Me," a picture at Leipzig, shows us the interior 
of a modem schoolroom in a small town, where the master 
stands in the background, while a group of children of all 
ages are gathered somewhat timidly near the chair on which 
a stranger, who has just entered, has taken his seat. This 
stranger is Christ, and we are made to see that He is gradually 
drawing the little ones to Himself by the magnetism of His 
personality. There are many pictures of the kind by the 
same hand, always serious and devout, but at the same time 
warm with himnian feeling. Their quality as works of art 
gives them a place as high as that which they claim as 
achievements in religious design. 

If it be asked in conclusion, Are the Germans an artistic 
people? it may be said that with them expression in the 
arts of form is not spontaneous but rather forced. One of 
their own writers has been quoted as den5dng to them the 
pictorial instinct, and we may doubt whether the artistic 
instinct in general exists in them, though as. a matter of 
set purpose they have " hacked their way through " to 
art to notable effect. There may be instanced the differ- 
ence between the well-pondered compositions of the German 
graphic designers of the nineteenth century and the facile 
brush-work of Scottish artists, who, innocent of science, 



ART 



231 



have shown themselves in every touch bom painters, to 
whom expression in colour and the handling of pigment is 
as natural as breathing. The Germans have done great 
things in the arts of which the world is proud, but they are 
not in the true sense an artistic race. 



VI 
GERMAN MUSIC 

By D. F. TOVEY, B.A. Oxon. 
Reid Professor of Music in the University of Edinburgh 



Music is, of all the arts, perhaps the most impossible to 
explain in words ; and writers on music deserve more 
sympathy than blame for the readiness with which they 
welcome topics that distract attention from the difficulties 
of purely musical questions. Where it is difficult to say 
anything without entering into principles and details which, 
to most readers, must seem purely technical, there is great 
temptation to discuss the first side-issue which connects the 
subject with ethics or politics, religion or science ; and if 
all that has been written on the history of music were 
reduced to that portion of it in which the history is musical 
and the view of music is historical, the bulk would be 
conveniently small, but far from easy to read. 

One of the most popular side-issues of musical history 
and criticism is the topic of racial or national character- 
istics. In any art it is inexhaustible and uncontrollable ; 
we need only trace an artist's ancestry, deduce from it an 
interesting complexity of racial characteristics, select from 
these just what we happen to see in the not less interesting 
complexity of his art, and we are saved all difficulty in writing 
readably about his art, or in studying it at all. Beethoven 
is of Belgian extraction ; some of Bach's ancestors settled 
in Hungary; the few classical composers of Germany 
whose German ancestry has never been explained away, 
have usually availed themselves of the fact that musicians 

233 



284 GERMAN CULTURE 

have more incentive to travel than most artists ; and an 
essay on German music that should respect the terms of 
an Aliens' Restriction Act in any period of European 
politics whatever, would be sadly lacking in historic con- 
tinuity. Fortxmately, however, it is now imiversally recog- 
nised that the history of an art is not bound to deal with 
questions of nationality on political or ethnological prin- 
ciples. We know that the genius loci has more control 
over the plastic arts than politics or race. And still higher 
ij than the authority of the genius loci is the authority which 

il spoken language has held over music even in periods where 

Ij purely instrumental music is, as the professional jargon has 

ij it, most " absolute." This raises a difficult and perhaps 

ji controversial point, to which we must recur more than 

I' once ; but at the outset it saves a world of trouble in 

defining German music. We need only decide to call that 
music German which has been written by composers to 
whom German was their first literary language, and not a 
single name in the long roll of accepted German classics 
will need explanation or apology. On no other condition 
\ is it possible to trace the workings of the German musical 

I spirit with any real understanding of its scope. 

I Our subject is, then, the music of composers who spoke 

I; German in preference to any other literary language. In 

!^ modern times this may be too broad a definition to be 

!; agreeable to the patriotism of distinguished Bohemians, 

Czechs, and Hungarians. Dvorak, for instance, showed 
himself far from gracious to the English university dons 
who offered him an address in German, beginning ** Hoch- 
i verehrter Herr.'' But Haydn left it to modern research to 

discover his Croatian nationality by an almost etymological 
comparison of the idioms of his melody with those of 
Croatian folk-music. We may leave open the question 
whether, as a grown man, Haydn knew the Croatian lan- 
guage much better than the average Irish member knows 
Erse ; what is certain is, that whereas fate or inclination 
made Italians of his compatriots, Giornovichi (Jarnowickz) 



MUSIC 235 

and Tartini, he, under the famous ItaUan master, Porpora, 
grew up as a pioneer of German musical art-forms and 
became, by right of perfect mastery, the '' Father of the 
Symphony," an art in which the Italians, though in a sense 
pioneers, achieved nothing. In his young days all musicians 
who claimed to common sense did their best to get an 
Italian training, whether at home or abroad. Patriotism 
had nothing to say in the matter ; music was an Italian 
art, and Germany had the patience to learn it as such 
before she made it her own. 

Nothing is more characteristic of German culture in 
general than the thoroughness with which not only the 
great classical German composers, but all the rank and file 
of German musical schools assimilated foreign music in 
every art-form. At no period in musical history has Ger- 
many shown any fear or jealousy of foreign domination, 
except when her serious musicians have felt compelled to 
protest against the domination of a debased and decadent 
art. If Rossini had been another Mozart, not a voice in 
Germany would have protested against the Rossini Jurore 
of the early nineteenth century ; and even as it was, Weber, 
whose own prospects were injured by it, complained that 
*' The worst of this rubbish is, that I am beginning to enjoy 
it myself." The main reason why German music has lost 
nothing by its periods of foreign domination, is that German 
composers have always been desperately eager to learn the 
principles of foreign musical forms, but have seldom been 
concerned to imitate foreign musical fashions in externals. 
Nothing in art, music, or literature is more intensely German 
than the style of J. S. Bach, and nothing is more charac- 
teristic of that style than his Italian Concerto and French 
Overture ; but Bach means by italienische Styl, stilo francese, 
and similar terms, the results of an accurate study and 
prolonged experience in the handling of the forms of the 
Italian concerto and the French overture, in consequence 
of which he is a far greater master of their fullest resources 
than any one of their French and Italian originators. With 



236 GERMAN CULTURE 

incredible accuracy he reproduces and develops every fibre 
that may serve to characterise their structure, until the 
best of the works that were his models appear compara- 
tively formless ; yet all his formal accuracy only serves to 
give him a strength of climax and freedom of expression 
compared to which his models appear inconclusive and stiff. 
Here, then, we may be inclined to note the musical 
results of German thoroughness and system ; but a salutary 
lesson awaits us in the contemporary work of Handel. 
Letters of naturalisation, no doubt, made a better English- 
man of Handel than the British crown made of George I ; 
and no doubt his early triumphs in Italy made him essen- 
tially an Italian musician ; but to Bach, as to any con- 
temporary gifted with common sense, this could only imply 
that Handel was a German musician who had exceptional 
advantages. Perhaps it was a result of these advantages, 
perhaps it was HandeFs natural disposition — probably 
Handel's disposition helped him to take his advantages — - 
but this fact remains, that Handel's art shows no system 
at all; unless we give the name of "system" to those 
methods that aim at the most rapid production of music 
in the greatest possible bulk, at whatever expense of quality. 
Handel, like Bach, uses Italian and French forms ; but he 
leaves them as he finds them, even in some of the notorious 
cases in which he did not leave an old composer's actual 
work where he found it. If we desire to note something 
essentially German that is characteristic of both Handel 
and Bach, we must accept Handel's lack of system and 
lack of scruple ; his uncritical acquiescence in the stagnant 
over-civilisation of Italian opera until sheer financial ruin 
drove him to the cultivation of oratorio ; and his almost 
total lack of progress in style until, comparatively late in 
life, the experience of the capacity of English choirs inspired 
him. When we accept these facts and compare them with 
the facts of Bach's stay-at-home industry and self -improve- 
ment, the common element becomes obvious. Both these 
enormously productive artists were bom improvisers ; they 



MUSIC 237 

were able at a moment's notice to produce the music the 
moment required. And they were perfectly contented to 
do so. If the results of this disposition are to be per- 
manently valuable, the conditions which demand music 
must be such as will give the musician a living wage and 
exercise his higher powers. It will avail him little that he 
is willing to begin *' at the bottom of the ladder " if there is 
no ladder. But Germany has always provided a ladder for 
musicians, whether under the ancient system of aristocratic 
patronage or under her modern municipal organisation, or 
even, as shown by the career of J. S. Bach, under both 
together. That is one of the conditions on which a country 
holds its claim to be musical. The musician has always 
been necessary to German political economy ; and it is 
arguable that Wagner was the first example on record of a 
German musician whose career was embittered by the fact 
that his projects were on too grand a scale to be reconciled 
with the civic duty of paying his way. Bach, then, like 
Handel, was a composer who earned a living wage by con- 
stantly writing for the occasion. The parish priest had to 
produce a sermon every Sunday ; the organist had to pro- 
duce a cantata. Cantatas are bulkier than sermons ; it is 
almost a week's uninterrupted work to copy out the parts 
of the average Bach cantata, and evidently no organist 
would care to take a post where the choir had not a large 
repertoire in being. But he would be expected to add to 
the repertoire, and to add rapidly and regularly. The 
problems of composition on such conditions are the prob- 
lems of improvising on paper — and there are certain very 
important differences between improvising on paper and 
improvising on an instrimient. Every great German com- 
poser up to and including Mendelssohn has had a marvellous 
talent for both. 

This point has always played a far greater part in musical 
history than is generally realised ; at present let us note 
that this aspect of German talent has also always shown 
itself practically in methods as well as in results. The 



238 GERMAN CULTURE 

" thorough and systematic " German seems, at least in the 
days of classical music, more ready to attack his task with 
blind fury than to wait for the establishment of scientific 
methods and refined standards of taste. He will snatch 
these with an eager grasp, and he will look out for them. 
But he will not wait for them. When Bumey made his 
tours in Germany and the Netherlands, his aristocratic 
English ears were sorely distressed at the evidences which 
assaulted them with proofs that German musical life, un- 
like English, was not confined almost exclusively to 
eminent foreign masters whose every note was a lesson 
in the inimitable. He found that students of every instru- 
ment of the orchestra often had to do all their practising 
at the same hour in the same room, with the single 
concession that the trumpeters were requested to practise 
on the staircase. This was one item of his experience 
of German methods ; his experience of the finished results 
is fairly typified by the fact that it was pointed out to 
him that no reasonable Saxon would expect the wind in- 
struments to remain in time with the orchestra throughout 
a concert. All this is but the seamy side of eighteenth- 
century music in a country which regards music as a neces- 
sity, and not as a fashion. The average native musician 
in such a country will very probably be inferior to the 
average musician of a country in which musicians are the 
rare fruits of special impulse and talent. On the other 
hand, eminence will not be so likely to starve, and strange 
phenomena in specialised skill may find scope. Whatever 
the tolerance Saxon audiences may have shown for out-of- 
tune wind, they must have been accustomed to trumpeters 
who, though they had to practise on the staircase, could 
give an intelligible account of Bach's trumpet-parts which 
have only recently been reconquered by the finest virtuosos 
on specially-constructed instrimients. With such vicissi- 
tudes in their daily musical diet, even the most aristocratic 
criticism and taste will have opportunities of basing them- 
selves on a nobler and wider experience than that of opulent 



MUSIC 239 

connoisseurship. And herein, far more than in the spirit of 
German thoroughness and system, we may see the advan- 
tages possessed by German musical scholarship at its best. 
It has had every opportunity of being scholarship in a 
living language and in a practical art. We shall, however, 
find instances in the famous " Mannheim School," whose 
systematic study of nuances in performance had so much 
influence on Moeart, and still more in the recent work of 
the Leipzig Conservatoire, where the weaknesses of the 
German imagination undeniably show themselves. And, 
paradoxical as my view may appear, I cannot feel inclined 
to regard the scholarly side of German musical culture as 
one of its strong points. It covers with great efficiency a 
vast and novel field, but although most of the pioneer work 
in musical scholarship has undoubtedly been German — 
although, indeed, we should have had hardly any trustworthy 
editions of musical classics at all (German or Italian), but 
for German piety and industry — it is permissible to say that 
the German musical scholar has latterly tended to part 
company with the experienced artist to an extent which 
imperils the very accuracy he seeks to attain. This, again, 
only bears out the drift of our argument that the strength 
of German music lies not in its method and thoroughness, 
but in its practical savoir vivre. Where it over-specialises 
it becomes unmusical, and the great stream of German 
musical life passes it by. 

The attempt to distinguish the music of Germany from 
that of all other nations can lead, after all, to only one 
definite conclusion as to the nature of its pre-eminence. 
The record of German musical classics is, above the record 
of almost any art, the achievement of works of art as 
perfect wholes. The great German composer's mastery of 
form is not the mastery which creates a mould which shall 
conveniently hold a given quantity of musical material ; it 
is a mastery akin to that by which fife itself shapes from 
within the bodies which it inhabits. This is the distin- 
guishing mark of the highest art ; and no more ambitious 



240 GERMAN CULTURE 

subject could be propounded for an essay on artistic matters. 
It was true of Italian music in the time of Palestrina ; it 
was true of the best Flemish music in the time of Josquin ; 
and it was true of such Englishmen as Tallis and Byrd. 
But of no nation has it been true throughout such an 
immense range of artistic experience as it has been in German 
music. In at least three phases of art as important and 
as distinct as, let us say, Greek drama, Shakespearean 
drama, and the modem novel, the classics of music have 
been almost exclusively the German classics. Matthew 
Arnold once suggested that people who found themselves 
carried away by enthusiasm for the smaller forms of poetry, 
or for archaic or other by-products, should keep in their 
minds a few supremely beautiful lines such as can only 
occur in poems of cosmic range, and should use these as 
" touchstones." Now if is possible, or even probable, that 
the best musical culture for as much as the last two hundred 
and fifty years, especially in Protestant countries, is seriously 
deficient in knowledge of what should lie at the root of all 
our musical experience, the art of Palestrina. It is quite 
certain that the musician does not live (unless he be some 
Roman Catholic choir-master who knows little else} who 
knows a Mass, or even a motet of Palestrina by heart. 
This does not imply a grave confession of ignorance ; there 
are plenty of musicians and amateurs who can recognise 
certain works of Palestrina when they hear or see them, 
and whose enjo5niient of them is unaffected and perfectly 
intelligent ; but the fact is that our memories are not 
trained to follow the Hues of sixteenth-century art-forms, 
and accordingly there is no reason why a man who can 
conduct a Wagner opera by heart should find himself able 
to remember ten bars of the Missa Papcs Marcelli, even 
though he be an enthusiastic student of sixteenth-century 
music. To this extent, then, we are in the position of 
Greekless Romans : our musical memory begins with Bach, 
and the great musical civilisation that ended a century 
before him we only know by hearsay. Great though this 



MUSIC 241 

reservation may be, it does not minimise the impressive fact 
that if we try a musical appKcation of Matthew Arnold's 
prophylactic against narrow enthusiasms for small pro- 
vinces of art, we shall find all our " touchstones " to be 
German. No musician could suggest any others without 
showing an already specialised taste — ^which, no doubt, a 
vast number of modern musicians would be extremely 
anxious to do. But this anxiety was just what Matthew 
Arnold had in mind when he suggested a rough, practical 
antidote based on normal experience of the classics. 

If German composers have created all the '' touchstones '* 
a musical Matthew Arnold could carry in his mind, it 
follows that a supreme sense of pure beauty is one of the 
special gifts of German music. This does not at first sight 
appear to be consistent with what is popularly known of 
other German talents, in the exercise of which physical 
beauty seldom receives the first consideration, or, if it does, 
often fails to aspire beyond prettiness. The paradox in 
German musical beauty results mainly from our habit of 
relegating the sixteenth century to the limbo of archaism. 
We must first realise that there is nothing archaic in Pales- 
trina, and that his treatment of the ecclesiastical modes is 
no more to be understood as a crude attempt to attain the 
self-evident truths of the classical key-system than Plato's 
philosophy is to be understood as an adumbration of 
Herbert Spencer's. We shall then find that in the sixteenth 
century the home of physical beauty in music was where 
popular belief expects to find it in other arts — in Italy. In 
Germany it had to wait until the art had become incom- 
parably more complex before its claims could be recognised. 
Then Germany recognised them as perhaps they have never 
been more perfectly recognised in any art ; but by that 
time the Italians had given up the real problems of euphony 
as manifested in every fibre of the musical structure, con- 
tenting themselves with cultivating it on the surface, until 
in the nineteenth century Italian music reached a state in 
which no instrumental accompaniment was too coarse to 





242 GERMAN CULTURE 

serve as a background to the roulades and vibratos of a 
solo singer, or too loud to pass muster as a '* support " to 
the voice so long as the higher instruments trumpeted the 
melody, and thus gave the singer credit for all the noise 
they made. 

So far, then, we are prepared to find in the history of 
German music evidences of a willmgness to learn which is 
radically distinct from, or even opposed to a readiness to 
follow the fashions ; a remarkable talent for improvising in 
all its forms (this, by the way, will strike everyone who has 
had any experience of German hospitality with its winning 
zest and resource in the designing of entertainments and 
the making of speeches) ; a firm grasp of the realities of 
art-problems, with an unshakable determination that none 
of them shall be sacrificed to the others, but that the work 
shall bear scrutiny from every aspect ; and, perhaps as 
the reward of the faithful exercise of these noble gifts, the 
attainment of a beauty as cogent and all-pervading as has 
ever been realised by the human mind. 

It now remains to illustrate these points in the music 
of each century. I shall not attempt to mention any 
but the great masters, except in so far as lesser masters 
have influenced them in a way that can be readily shown. 
Music exists in performance, and music that is not per- 
formed is accessible only to musicians who have cultivated 
their imagination assiduously in the reading of scores. 
When such musicians regret the neglect of certain com- 
posers, they mean that to perform their works would be a 
valuable service to musical culture in the world at large ; 
and where that service has not been rendered, musical 
culture in general cannot be said to possess the works. 



II 

The earliest great name in the history of German music 
as an independent art is that of Heinrich Isaac, who 
flourished in the later decades of the fifteenth century. No 



I 



MUSIC 243 

doubt much that is interesting can be said about Minne- 
singers and Meistersingers long before his time, but, Uke 
all that can be said about music before choral polyphony 
became a mastered language of art, it belongs more pro- 
fitably to the history of poetry than to any but the most 
severely antiquarian technicalities of musical embryology. 
With Isaac, however, we have unmistakably to do with a 
great composer, almost certainly as great a master as his 
Netherlandish contemporary, Obrecht, though I have not 
hitherto met with any of his work that seems to show the 
genius of Josquin Despres, whom we have every reason to 
regard as the Giotto of musical art. But Isaac's Choralis 
Constantinus is undoubtedly one of the greatest monuments 
of early polyphony, comprising, as it does, a complete 
repertoire of liturgical music for the whole year. It has 
been recently published in score, too late for mention in 
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Isaac's 
name is kept familiar to us at the present day by the fact 
that, like his contemporary, Heinrich Finck, he produced 
many of the earliest harmonised settings of those famous 
songs which, whether devout or secular, so early justified, 
by their grave sweetness and strength, their whole-hearted 
adoption as the " chorales " of the Lutheran Church. Where 
no earlier setting of a " chorale " ^ is to be found than Isaac's 
it is natural to make the extremely unsafe assumption that 
he invented the melody ; and no doubt he was perfectly 
capable of doing so if it was necessary for him to take the 
trouble. We have no reason to suppose that his genius 
was in any way inferior to the genius loci which originated 
such melodies. But, as a musician whose imagination was 
fired with the glorious and mysterious possibilities of the 
art of coimterpoint, he found his plain duty and pleasure in 
taking the course of Flemish contemporaries, who were the 
musical overlords of Europe ; and neither in Germany nor 
elsewhere would the art of music have been learnt so quickly 

^ I have no scruple in using the final e in this word to indicate its foreign 
accentuation, and to distinguish it from the English adjective "choral." 



244 GERMAN CULTURE 

and so perfectly if northern musicians had been too ready 
to anticipate the ItaUans' and the Spaniards' pertinacious 
questionings as to whether all forms of Flemish ingenuity 
were really beautiful. Musical histories and dictionaries are 
full of enthusiastic accounts of such ancient masters as 
Isaac, and the enthusiasm, where it is the accompaniment 
of original research, may be sympathetic and genuine ; but 
some warning is necessary against the false impressions 
which arise when the enthusiasm passes from researchers to 
compilers, or even when the musicians who can read scores 
with a conductor's or composer's realisation of the musical 
effect delegate the task of research to experts who can only 
tell the date of a manuscript by the water-mark in the 
paper. A mere musician may be excused if he is now and 
then tempted to indulge in gibes at the musical culture 
which invites him to subscribe to critical editions of enor- 
mous complete volumes of Isaac and Obrecht while the 
wonderful versatility and poetic beauty of Josquin still 
remain accessible only in casual examples scattered through 
divers more or less untrustworthy anthologies. This is an 
oft-recurring phenomenon of musical scholarship ; the 
scholar who has the knowledge and patience which might 
avail to restore authenticity to the text of a masterpiece 
has too often the temperament that prefers to be absorbed 
in side-issues. 

The mention of Isaac's part in the history of the German 
chorale brings us to the very centre of German music. It 
is all the more necessary that we should understand clearly 
what is and what is not peculiar to Germany in this insti- 
tution of the chorale. Luther himself was a good musician ; 
he learnt his music where he learnt his theology, and only 
as a *' turbulent priest " of the Reman Catholic Church 
could he bring about the Protestant Reformation. There 
was nothing peculiarly Protestant in his accepting secular 
melodies as hymn-tunes; both that procedure and its justi- 
fication '' that there was no reason why the devil should 
take all the best tunes," would have met with the thorough 



MUSIC 245 

approval of Animuccia, who seems to have done something 
of the same kind in the Laudi Spirituali which he produced 
in the oratory of his friend, St. FiHppo Neri. Yet musical 
history prefers to regard Animuccia as one df the pioneers 
of the oratorio as an art-form, rather than to recognise 
him as representing in Rome itself an effort, not altogether 
unlike that shown by the psalm-books of Geneva, to pro- 
duce a religious music that could be " understanded of the 
people." We must make allowance for the instinct which 
leads us to assume that because the Italian language has 
been a foreign fashion in musical England and Germany, it 
has been so in Italy too. 

But if it is our duty to minimise the originality of the 
German chorale as an art-form, it is all the more impossible 
to exaggerate its distinction as an expression of the German 
spirit. The defiant words of " Ein' teste Burg '* can tell 
us plainly of Luther's fire and strength ; but his tune gives 
more than his word for it that the fire and strength are 
divine. No one could sing the poem and remain a Roman 
Catholic ; no one could sing the tune and fight in an 
ignoble spirit. In as far as German music fought on the 
side of the Reformation, it fought with tremendous power, 
and the encouragement of congregational singing armed the 
laity with Luther's mightiest weapons. Luther's tunes and 
the Austrian national anthem are perhaps of all music that 
has ever inspired the populace in a national crisis, the only 
melodies that can add an intrinsic musical dignity to the 
force of their historic associations. The Marseillaise begins 
well, but Schumann found himself compelled to strengthen 
and simplify it before he could use it as the climax of Die 
heiden Grenadiere. But the composer who desires to decorate 
his own music with an allusion to ** Ein' feste Burg " must 
wear a giant's robe. Wagner knew this, and in the Kaiser- 
mar sch alluded to but two lines of the tune, with just the 
noble reticence that an ancient Greek artist would show for 
things divine. Mendelssohn in his Reformation Symphony 
was more ambitious, but he confessed that he failed here, 



246 GERMAN CULTURE 

and he never allowed the work to be published, and would 
probably have destroyed it if he had thought it would 
appear posthumously. Meyerbeer was quite unconscious 
of any difficulty in handling the tune. It was, and is, one 
of the great attractions of Les Huguenots, and its brilliant 
treatment in double-quick march at the end of the overture 
is, to the best of my belief, the filthiest blasphemy in all 
music. Putting aside all questions as to the worthiness of 
the composer, there was only one period in which the tune 
could be treated in an elaborate work the form and purpose 
of which was both worthy of it and relevant; and that 
period was not Luther's own, but John Sebastian Bach's. 
Bach's own cantata on " Ein' teste Burg " is one of his 
greater works and is in every respect worthy of the tune ; 
but it is quite likely that his contemporaries had succeeded 
in treating the tune in a musical language that was not 
offensive in relation to it, though they certainly never pro- 
duced a work comparable to Bach's. This is noteworthy 
as showing the way in which musical developments arise 
at periods utterly remote from those periods in the world 
at large to which they seem most akin. The great music 
which shall vibrate in ideal sympathy with the spirit of the 
Reformation does not arise until Voltaire is at the court of 
Frederick the Great. 

The natural tendency to think of Germany as the 
country of Luther must not blind us to the fact that, while 
the music of the Reformation was still limited to a branch 
of folk-song, the Roman Catholic Church possessed the 
devotion of the greatest German masters of pure poly- 
phony. Their names are unfamiUar to modem concert- 
goers, and the occasional discovery and exploitation by 
madrigal societies of some exquisite strophic song by Eccard 
(1553-1611) or Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) will not per- 
haps avail to bring this or that otherwise forgotten name, 
whether Roman or Lutheran, within the scope of this essay, 
whatever their actual historical and artistic importance. 
But there can be no doubt that we must mention those 



MUSIC 247 

sixteenth-century German masters whose works are to 
this day cultivated in the repertoires of Roman CathoUc 
choirs ; all the more because musical history has been 
incHned to ignore them. Moreover, there is no opportunity 
of finding clues to the special qualities and range of the 
German musical genius so favourable as that furnished 
by a period in which German music was evidently both 
masterly and self-confident, but at the same time decidedly 
incapable of either attaining the standard set by Rome or 
of imposing its own standard upon the world. With the 
time of Bach and Handel, German music, as first represented 
by these two great names, becomes classical music par 
excellence^ not in the estimation of the eighteenth century, 
but in the modern musical memory ; and it is perhaps 
neither possible nor desirable that our normal ideas of 
what is classical in music should not be essentially German. 
But this may easily mislead us into assuming that what 
is essentially German in music is necessarily normal. And 
there are stages, early and late, in musical history where 
this is not true. In sixteenth-century music, if we wish 
to profit by Matthew Arnold's advice to poetic enthusiasts, 
we must look to Palestrina, Victoria, Marenzio, to Rome 
and Spain for our " touchstones.'' The task of criticism 
is here very difficult and delicate ; those who best know 
the vast territory to be explored have either the impulse 
of explorers or (to put the matter frankly) the horizon of 
Roman Catholic choir-masters. The explorers, after a 
long day's journey through an unknown country, will some- 
times fail to recognise a familiar landmark if it meets 
their sight at an unaccustomed angle ; thus, the editor of 
Hans Leo Hasler's works finds in his Missa Come ftiggir 
peculiarities of phrasing which seem to him quite unpre- 
cedented in the classics of the sixteenth century. But 
this mass turns out to be based on a madrigal Come fuggir 
by that most famous and perfect of madrigalists, Luca 
Marenzio ; the whole hypothesis of a sixteenth-century 
mass with a title (whether secular or sacred) is that it takes 



248 GERMAN CULTURE 

its title from the source of its themes ; whatever peculiarities 
there may be in Hasler's mass must inevitably show them- 
selves in Marenzio's madrigal ; yet Come fuggir is not only 
a perfectly normal specimen of his style, but is accessible 
in more than one popular anthology. We may fairly 
conclude from this that if we absorb ourselves in the 
German schools of sixteenth-century choral writing, it is 
possible that the purest classical style of Italy may become 
strange to us. Of course, a patriotic German might argue 
that the musical supremacy of Italy at that period was a 
superstition ; and, indeed, there always will be a strong, 
and far from contemptible instinct to assert the claims 
of a "provinciar' art to possess more "individuality" 
than the classics " of the centre.'' This is actually true 
enough so long as we have only schoolmen to deal with. 
In the sixteenth century a weak effort of Aichinger's is as 
surely worth more than a stock masterpiece of Croce's as 
one of John Field's nocturnes is worth more than the 
Adagio of Spohr's Ninth Concerto. The trouble begins 
when we drag in Palestrina, or any other such master as 
can create the daylight in which the schoolmen work and 
shine. He who despises the light of common day will 
never have any but a hearsay knowledge of the light that 
never was on sea or land ; nor will he recognise it in the 
daylight of Palestrina and Marenzio, though it is there. 

But while it is impossible to put the German music 
of the sixteenth century on a level with the Italian, or even 
with the achievements of our own great masters Tallis and 
Byrd, yet the best work of such masters as Hans Leo Hasler 
(1564-1612), Gregor Aichinger (1565-1628), and Handl, 
better known as Gallus (1550-1591), is of high importance 
both historically and aesthetically. Warned by the German 
scholar's misadventure with Hasler's mass on Come fuggir, 
the reader will accept my generalisations with caution , 
but I shall as far as possible confine them to arguments 
that explain themselves. In the first place, no accumu- 
lation of errors on points of musical scholarship could 



MUSIC 249 

invalidate the general conclusion of German experts that 
the two dominating influences in German choral music at 
the close of the sixteenth century are those of that greatest of 
Netherlanders, Orlando di Lasso (1530-1594), who settled in 
Bavaria, and of the Venetian school represented by the 
elder and younger Gabrieh. If the rather sentimental 
piety of Aichinger disinclined him to yield to the influence 
of Lasso (though they both came under the patronage of 
the Fuggers and of Duke Albrecht), it is none the less a sign 
of some strength of individuality that his music should 
succeed in avoiding all resemblance to that of so powerful 
and dominating a mind. If Aichinger had also succeeded 
in avoiding Venetian influences, it is hard to see on what 
basis he, as a German Roman Catholic occupied with 
elaborate liturgical art-forms, could have been a German 
composer. Hasler, a much greater master, with a far wider 
range of expression, is at this day well known to Roman 
Catholic choirs by his Missa Dixit Maria, written on his 
own motet of that title ; the motet is very pretty, and 
the popularity of the mass is largely due to the fact that 
in it the prettiness of the motet is spun out to a thinness 
that brings the purest style of the sixteenth century into 
curious proximity with the sentimentality of nineteenth- 
century religious pictorial art of the Biedermayerzeit. It 
does not represent him at his best, though it is more German 
than his greater inspirations. Gallus (a Latin translation 
which conceals the German name of Handl, which in its 
turn conceals the Bohemian name of Petelin) is perhaps 
the most independent of the German choral composers of 
his time ; if his work reminds us more often of Lasso than 
of the Venetian school, that is mainly because both he and 
Lasso are often eccentric and experimental. But Lasso's 
experiments, even at their worst, have some amusing whim 
behind them which is both literary and musical ; while 
Gallus is capable of writing in sixteen real parts without 
a single idea in his head beyond the theoretic possibility of 
sixteen-part counterpoint. Yet theoretic possibilities some- 



250 GERMAN CULTURE 

times stimulate him to produce unmistakably great music ; 
and this is a frequent phenomenon, by no means confined j 
to Germany, but often characteristic of periods of artistic 
transition, where rigid forms (such as those of canon) may 
give the composer the solace which the sonnet gave to 
Wordsworth when he '' felt the weight of too much liberty/' 
Perhaps on the present occasion the risk of dogmatic 
assertion is preferable to the risk of dwelling disproportion- 
ately long on a period in which German music has admittedly 
not attained its majority. A mass of evidence which, 
though far from complete, is too large for discussion here, 
indicates that Lasso, the Venetian school, and the special 
genius of German music have certain elements in common 
which it is more important to recognise for what they are 
than to assign by right of priority to one master rather than 
another. Mr. Berenson, in one of his essays on Venetian 
schools of painting, has characterised the Venetian painters as 
being eminently '* illustrators '* ; and they have always been 
supposed to take a special interest in colour for its own 
sake. We need not attach any solid value to the coinci- 
dence, but both these statements happen to be very luminous 
as applied to the Venetian school of sixteenth-century 
music. They also apply to Lasso and to his German con- 
temporaries. Only in Lasso's case are they often manifested 
in works of the highest genius, wherein they become not only 
compatible with qualities more purely musical, but actually 
themselves give rise to the profoundest musical ideas. His 
German contemporaries show them too often as weaknesses, 
except where the conditions are specially favourable to 
musical effect. These favourable conditions are likely to arise 
when the composer deals with a chorus divided into a large 
number of parts. If you wish to find some motet of Hasler's 
that shall bear comparison with Palestrina, you may shorten 
your search by turning at once to the twelve-part com- 
positions at the end of the volume. Only Palestrina, 
Marenzio, Victoria, and Lasso can rise to their greatest 
heights as often in four-part as in six-part music. This is 



MUSIC 251 

partly because they are still greater masters of musical 
colour than any composer can be while his mind is bent 
on colour for its own sake ; their vision of normal colours 
is never dulled, and what is novel to jaded eyes is to their 
undazzled gaze one more thing which must await its turn 
for use when it is wanted. 

We may find another clear sign that the German musical 
talent is, in its early stages, a talent for illustration, in the 
fact that in the sixteenth century the Germans were not at 
their best in the composition of the mass. Neither, for that 
matter, was Lasso, though his masses fill eight volumes. 
A text that must be set by all composers and sung every 
Sunday and holy day in the year ; a subject that must be 
painted as altarpieces for every church in Christendom : 
these are things which damp the inspiration of the illus- 
trator, while they give freedom to the " absolute '' artist who 
feels his art to lie in things that cannot be translated or de- 
scribed. This seems a strange conclusion concerning the early 
masters of the nation that has not only made of " absolute 
music'' perhaps most powerful and perfect art the world 
has yet seen, but has been the only nation to achieve 
any large body of '* absolute'' music that can claim to be 
powerful or perfect at all. But when we come to reckon 
up what materials are necessary to the creation of even 
so closely limited a form of " absolute music " as one of 
Bach's Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues, the paradox will 
cease to puzzle us. The ''absolutism " of German classical 
music is like the happiness of Aristotelian ethics ; it pre- 
supposes ''adequate external resources," and it will not betake 
itself to the mountain fastnesses of the contemplative life 
as if the rest of human life was a thing to be despised. 
Neither, for that matter, did the great musical saints of Italy 
and Spain so shun the world ; they were no ascetics, but 
artists whose native talent found the resources of pure 
vocal polyphony inexhaustible, and all other musical 
resources infantile and squalid. The native German talent 
is not eminently vocal, and this, at the outset, put Germany 



252 GERMAN CULTURE 

at a disadvantage compared with Italy. But it is not in 
the German nature to be content with the Umitations of 
its native talent ; no doubt, herein the German often shows 
less taste than the Frenchman or Italian ; but it is here 
also that the quick, impatient intelligence of the Latin 
artist often destroys his prospects. 

Ill 

When the resources of Palestrina Were exhausted, 
nothing could be more spirited and adroit than the revolu- 
tion effected by the Monodists, the first pioneers of opera, 
whose work was so brilliantly carried farther by the 
mastery of Monteverde (1567-1643). The first Monodists 
were content to achieve their revolution with very little 
musical talent and no artistic resources that time could 
preserve ; the only elements of their art that seem 
to them relevant or interesting were the new elements. 
Perhaps it is too dogmatic to assert that no German could 
have so parted with his musical birthright as Caccini and 
Peri ; but we know of no German who did, and nothing 
in German music of any period would lead us to believe 
that a German composer who had so little musical talent 
as Peri would have either the effrontery to attempt a new 
departure or the discretion to evade comparison with older 
masters. The Italian monodic revolution had no definite 
parallel in Germany, but it had an immediate and profound 
influence on German music, and its results therein were 
significantly different from its results in Italy. To the 
Italians the issues seemed plain from the outset ; the new 
art, so long as it remained new, was either everything or 
nothing ; the artist must choose between the new way 
and the old, or else show himself to be a confused and 
characterless eclectic. In such a clear, logical atmosphere 
progress in pioneer work is rapid, but very little art is 
produced that has permanent value. A disproportionate 
onus is thrown on the personality of the artist, whether 



MUSIC 253 

tie be the author or the performer of pioneer works ; and 
the artist who still cultivates his classics is driven to adopt 
an ascetic and reactionary attitude even if it be foreign 
to his temperament. And no art stiffens into convention- 
ality more rapidly and firmly than the most revolutionary 
art, partly because of the tendency of all revolutionaries 
to rely more on a priori logic than on experience, and partly 
for the contrary reason that the revolutionary art owes 
so much of its initial success to the personality of its in- 
augurators that, when that personaHty is no longer present, 
'' tradition " reigns in its stead, and, when the conflicting 
traditions have cancelled each other out, hagiology arranges 
and supplements the whole until the record is immutable 
and complete. It is astonishing how quickly dramatic 
music advanced in Italy from the time of Monteverde to 
that of Alessandro Scarlatti ; but nothing in the history of 
art is more notorious than the stagnant tyranny of Italian 
opera throughout Europe from the time of Alessandro 
Scarlatti to that of Gluck's reforms. Like all notorious his- 
tories, the facts are less crude than the reformers' accounts 
of them, and there is some significance in the non-appear- 
ance of any definite musical revolutionary among German 
composers before Gluck himself. Returning to the begin- 
ning of the seventeenth century, we may find in Heinrich 
Schiitz (1585-1672) a splendid example of the qualities 
which in the next century were to raise Germany to a 
height in music such as has been attained in no other intel- 
lectual province since the days of ancient Greece. 

Schiitz's prefaces to the volumes of his works published 
in his lifetime show him to be far from inarticulate apart 
from his music ; he could evidently have held his own 
in a contest with the Italian theorists who contributed 
so many effective pamphlets for and against Monteverde 
and his tendencies. At least once he mentions Monteverde 
by name as '' mein scharfsinniger Freund ; '' he adapts 
one of Monteverde's monodic cantatas to a sacred text ; 
and he also puts a translation of one of the purest of his 



254 GERMAN CULTURE 

master Gabrieli's Latin motets into one of his own German 
volumes, by way of acknowledging his schooling. Every- 
where he shows the keenest interest in the point of what 
his contemporaries and predecessors did ; but nowhere 
does he betray any inclination to decide between one ten- 
dency and another. He does not seem to see any necessity 
for a decision. And yet his is no weak eclecticism ; nor 
does he often miss the point of any device that he adopts, 
whether foreign or native. He is a great enough contra- 
puntist to have moved with ease among the restrictions of 
the purest sixteenth-century style ; and he uses his contra- 
puntal mastery regardless or unconscious of the prejudice 
it must arouse among his revolutionary colleagues in Italy. 
It would be interesting to know what his "keen-witted 
friend'* Monteverde really thought of his style. Probably 
Schiitz seemed to the Italian monodists to be an ingenious 
but puzzle-headed barbarian, if ever he attracted their 
attention at all. One way in which Italian polyphony 
of the old school showed its decadence, in its last 
struggles for existence, was by piling up vast masses 
of stagnant harmony for multitudes of antiphonal choirs. 
Schiitz erected many such Gothic piles, but they would 
not be very acceptable to the Italian reactionaries, for 
they are as modem in their "licences'' as the most 
emotional monody. Not that the reactionaries could not 
make the best of both worlds ; was not the saintly Pitoni 
so great a master of contrapuntal abstraction of mind that 
when he composed a forty-eight-part mass for twelve 
choirs he wrote first the twelve basses, then the tenors, 
altos, and sopranos, part by part separately without ever 
making a score ; and did not this same Pitoni produce an 
astonishing effect by introducing short chromatic trios 
into the Dies Ires of his Missa pro Defunctis ? 

Archaic as most of Schiitz's work seems to us, and 
rarely as he produces a coherent musical scheme, he is a 
composer who conclusively proves that it was in Germany, 
and not in Italy, that the questions raised by the monodists 



MUSIC 255 

were to be answered without false simplifications. Music, 
whether " progressive " or reactionary, was already be- 
coming too easy for the ItaUan talent ; it no longer ab- 
sorbed the whole capacity of men of character so simple 
and great as Palestrina. Nine-tenths of the discussion 
which raged round Monteverde and his older and younger 
colleagues was literary ; and to this day few musical 
historians attempt to sift the obscure and difficult musical 
facts from their brilliant dramatic and rhetorical accessories. 
Already Germany seems to be much more the home of 
" absolute music '' than Italy ; at all events, it is impossible 
to describe any work by Schiitz without entering into 
details far more purely musical than we find to discuss 
in the works of Monteverde. Yet Schiitz is no " absolute 
musician *' in the sense of a composer who is independent 
of the text his singers are to deliver ; he is as minute and 
irrepressible an illustrator as the most luxurious Venetian, 
and it is impossible to tell whether he could have proved 
the purity of his musical nature by setting a text of universal 
application. As a Protestant, he never wrote a Mass, and the 
Reformation was so recent that there was dramatic emotion 
in the mere use of the German language for religious music. 
But this did not prevent music from attaining its own 
integrity in the hands of men like Schiitz. Few classical 
artists have worried about the " legitimacy '' of letting their 
art illustrate something external to itself. A complete 
work of art is incomparably more complex than any one 
method of logical analysis or technique ; it is the outcome 
of an experience far more comprehensive than its osten- 
sible contents ; and the slowest and most self-conscious 
of composers attains his final result by methods of trial 
and error which have, no doubt, been greatly shortened 
by technical training, but which have no more direct con- 
nection with that training than any other form of presence 
of mind in emergencies. It is a matter of complete indiffer- 
ence to a mature work of art whether the theory on which 
it is based recognises the integrity of the art or not, so long 



256 GERMAN CULTURE 

as the theory has not prevented the artist from using his 
whole resources. His mind ought to be Uke a saturated 
solution of something that will crystallise round any foreign 
body that is dropped into it at the right moment. The 
crystals will reject everything in the solution that is irre- 
levant, and it is the foreign body that helps them to do so 
by inciting them to form. When they have formed it 
can be removed, or perhaps even dissolved, if it has been 
of such a shape that what is once built round it is in stable 
equilibrium. An alphabetical acrostic is a perfectly satis- 
factory form for Hebrew poetry ; it completely vanishes 
in translation, and Palestrina, following the uses of his 
liturgy, derives from it a far more mysterious but equally 
harmless irrelevant stimulus to his art by making highly 
ornamental settings of the names of the Hebrew letters at 
the beginning of each verse of the Lamentations. Here, 
then, we have music that becomes " absolute " because 
some of its words have become merely magical. German 
music becomes purely musical in the way in which Pales- 
trina's general ideals of church music are purely musical ; 
and this is a way which may truthfully be said to have 
passed away from Italian music (with the rarest excep- 
tions) since Palestrina's time. 

Let us illustrate this in detail by an example where 
Schiitz, adapting approved Italian monodic methods to 
German conditions, fails, and produces a comic effect such 
as the enemies of Monteverde could never have caricatured, 
because Monteverde never suggested anything of the kind. 
There was in many German towns a picturesque custom, 
on occasional holy days, of playing music for trombones on 
the tops of church towers, with or without singing. Inspired 
by this Thurm-musik, Schiitz writes two pieces for a bass 
voice accompanied by four trombones and an organ. The 
organ and the choice of a single deep bass voice show that 
these pieces are not themselves Thurm-musik; but the 
horrible suggestion that the first two trombones may be 
replaced by violins an octave higher shows that Schiitz 



MUSIC 257 

was too familiar with the trombone-quartet as a customary 
form of open-air music to have any sense that it ought 
to be specially dignified. The text of the second of these 
pieces is exactly the sort of proclamation that should be 
delivered from a church tower, and this makes the complete 
failure of the piece all the more significant. First there 
is a long introduction for the trombones and organ, be- 
ginning grandly, but soon becoming much too athletic 
for the dignity of the trombones. They can play it fairly 
easily, but that does not prevent us from wishing it were 
impossible. However, after a minute or two of this eccle- 
siastical clog-dance they double-shuffie their way to a 
decorous full close ; and then the bass voice, accompanied 
by the organ, declaims, " Attendite, popule meus, legem 
meam ; inclinate am em vestram in verba oris mei. Aperiam 
in parabolis os meum, loquar propositiones ah initio,'' This 
takes some time, as the words are often repeated. Then 
follows another symphony for the trombones, beginning 
very finely, but losing dignity almost in the same way as 
the first symphony. When this is over, the voice has a 
duet with the first trombone, accompanied by the organ. 
The text is merely : 

" Quanta audivimus et cognovimus ea et patres nostri 
narraverunt nobisP 

but this movement is longer than the other vocal movement, 
and it concludes the work. 

Now let us see what points Schiitz makes in this not 
very suggestive or complete utterance. His treatment of 
^' Attendite, popule meus,'' is a series of full closes in which 
the singer, being a bass, sings the bare bass of the harmony 
as if it was a thing of great intrinsic musical interest. So 
it was — to Schiitz ; the rise of monodic singing and of in- 
strumental accompaniment had just awakened the musical 
world to the fact that the bass of a mass of harmony really 
had a specially " fundamental " character that made it 
in many respects the opposite of "melody," in whatever 

R 



258 GERMAN CULTURE 

other part melody was to be found. And at such a time 
the more purely musical a composer's disposition, the 
greater would be his temptation to think that there was 
some special merit and interest in a bass that had obviously 
never been intended by nature for a melody. Here, then, 
the German composer might have been better guided by a 
Latin sense of beauty ; but that quality had already deserted 
the Italians themselves, or rather, they had at that junc- 
ture little use for it. But they had a pertinacious interest 
in dramatic expression, and this might have led Schiitz 
to inquire whether these bare basses really meant anything 
at all. To the artist the danger in such inquiries is often 
much the same as the danger to science in insisting upon 
knowing the practical use of every line of thought. The 
" speaking bass '' might never have become the tre- 
mendous rhetorical force Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner 
made of it if German composers had had the tasteful common 
sense to strangle it for talking nonsense in the time of Schiitz. 
Schiitz's next point is the merely habitual choice of a 
declining figure for the word '' incUnafe/' a piece of illus- 
trative penmanship which modern criticism derides, but 
which any composer earlier than the nineteenth century 
would have found more troublesome to avoid than to make 
musically natural. Here again we have one of the many 
ways in which a habit, irrational in itself perhaps as well 
as in its application, may be a help rather than a hindrance 
to an artist's invention. This little figure does Schiitz's 
music no harm. He is less fortunate when " in verba oris 
mei " suggests to him the desirability of a long flourish 
on " oris.*' In spite of modern English and Teutonic 
prejudices, it is not true that vocal color atur is devoid of 
intrinsic expression. It is not a natural feature in declama- 
tion, but it is one of the first things which distinguishes 
song from speech ; and if singing is comparatively un- 
natural to northern races, it is natural enough to southern, 
and so the Italian composer has always recognised color atur 
as an expression of those emotions that prefer singing to 



MUSIC 259 

speaking. Schiitz's flourish on ''oris'' is wrong, partly 
because the text is unemotional, and partly because Schiitz 
tries to make his flourish original. And it so happens that 
the flourish he produces is exactly the same as one that 
Orlando di Lasso used some sixty years earlier to illustrate a 
drunken peasant rolling about to the words, "Soil der 
Bauer nicht voU sein ? " As a coincidence, this is of 
no importance whatever ; such " reminiscences " are most 
readily detected and discussed by critics to whom music 
most completely fails to convey any coherent or accurate 
impression. The point that ruins Schiitz's flourish has 
nothing to do with the question of whether he knew 
Lasso's song — it is simply this, that as an illustration of 
Lasso's meaning it is so admirable that for a singer to 
give it any other expression is a sheer physical impos- 
sibility. If we do not know Lasso's song, Schiitz's flourish 
is vaguely grotesque, and that is the best we can make 
of it. Later on, the word " narrabo " makes the singer 
naively garrulous. That is a pity ; but it also makes the 
first trombone garrulous, and that is a scandal. It is 
impossible to conceive that an Italian composer would 
ever produce anything so uncouth in all its gestures and 
habits. In the lowest degradation of nineteenth-century 
Italian opera, where the orchestra is more brutal than the 
steam-band of a merry-go-round, and where the coarsest 
dance-rhythms are a support for brilliant coloraUir-smging 
in the most gruesome death-agonies, there always remains 
a strangely august sense of one abiding truth which no Italian 
can forget, and which may be described as truth of gesture. 
Italian music has never lost the superb gesture ; and the 
superb gesture can never be wholly laughable, even when it 
is all that an art has left. For want of it Schiitz cannot 
set a dignified Fest-und-Gedenksspruch such as Brahms 
achieved some two hundred and fifty years later, though 
Schiitz uses a most picturesque combination of instruments, 
while Brahms falls back on the vocal resources of Schiitz's 
Venetian master. 



260 GERMAN CULTURE 

Now let us look at Schiitz's other piece for the same 
combination. It shows exactly the same external features ; 
there is the same squalid suggestion that two of the trom- 
bones may be replaced by violins; there is the same 
alternation of two symphonies for the trombones, and 
two sections for the voice and organ, with the trom- 
bones taking part towards the end. But so long as we 
reject the idea of violins, there is nothing uncouth or 
grotesque in the work from beginning to end. It is David's 
lamentation for Absalom ; and the text is simply this : 

" Fill miy Absalon " ; 

and, after the second symphony (which, though agitated in 
rhythm, is admirably suited to the dignity of the instru- 
ments :) 

" Quis mi hi tribuaf, ut ego moriar pro te I Absalon^ fili miy 
Absalon V' 

There is no coloratur, and the voice rarely sings a bass 
that is merely fundamental ; but in all other respects the 
technique is indistinguishable from that of the other piece. 
Yet the pathos and beauty of the whole is nothing short 
of sublime, nor has it any parallel in Italian music since 
Palestrina's Paucitas dierum. Now we must note two 
things about the text of this piece. Firstly, it is undeni- 
ably dramatic, in a way in which the text of Palestrina's 
Paucitas dierum is not. Paucitas dierum comes, indeed, 
from a dramatic book of the Bible, being part of Job's 
complaint ; but, as an extract from a much longer speech, 
it has no quality that marks a definite moment in an action 
or event. But Schiitz's text is David's lament exactly as it is 
given most dramatically in the Biblical account of how he 
received the news of Absalom's death ; its only rhetoric is its 
perfect realism ; the chronicler even hints that the words 
were repeated again and again much as Schiitz repeats them, 
and as he would have repeated them for merely musical 
reasons even if he had no dramatic feeling at all. Secondly, 



MUSIC 261 

whatever music can accomplish for such a text will not be 
accomplished by superb gestures. With all its realism, the 
text is of a kind that gives music perfect freedom ; it 
demands no more dramatic movement than an Amen 
chorus. But its intense emotion demands and triumphantly 
obtains from the German composer a quality essential to 
the highest art, a quality often present in German musicians 
whose mastery falls short of the highest — a quality, indeed, 
so characteristically German that the best words for it are 
but awkwardly translatable into any other language. Inner- 
lichkeit is the more matter-of-fact word. Schiitz's Lumen- 
tatio Davidi shows the " inwardness '' of German music, 
with its power of revealing the soul where gesture can 
only conceal the face. Innigkeit is the untranslatable 
word ; the great German music covers an immense range 
of emotion and thought, but alike in Haydn's irrepressible 
humour, in the mysterious profundity of Beethoven's last 
quartets, in the carpet-slippered intimacy of Schumann's 
pianoforte music, and in the devouring passion of Wagner's 
Tristan und Isolde, the art is innig throughout every fibre, 
as it is in the saintly music of Palestrina. The famous 
nineteenth-century discovery of the contrast between the 
'' classical " and the " romantic " becomes utterly irre- 
levant where this deepest of human qualities appears. So 
also does every question as to the actual limits of thought 
or emotion in any given work, or even in the life's work 
of any one artist. It is idle to minimise the greatness of 
Mozart by doubting his capacity to express tragic passion ; 
no competent critic will confuse beauty with prettiness in 
Mozart's Figaro any more than in the Hermes of Praxiteles. 
Again, where the art is innig we need never trouble to ask 
if it is " absolute." Innigkeit sets the spirit of music 
free, whether the music has to adapt its forms to externals 
or not. The musical forms of Figaro are not as rich and 
complex in themselves as those of Mozart's string quartets, 
concertos, and symphonies ; but they are quite as perfect 
in themselves, and what they might seem to lack in com- 



262 GERMAN CULTURE 

plexity is supplied by their intimate union with a dramatic 
text which they so transfigure that a bowdlerised Beau- 
marchais becomes something like a Shakespeare in Mozart's 
hands. 

But the German composer's Innigkeit was not alone 
sufficient to make music a perfect classical art ; nor was 
the Italian's aristocratic instinct for gesture a superfluous 
quality or a sure sign of insincerity. From the time of 
Schiitz onwards till the youth of Beethoven — i.e. from 1600 
to 1800 — Germany continued to learn its musical language 
and etiquette from Italy : and it is not too much to say 
that from the time Germany ceased to do so, pseudo-classi- 
cism, which appears at all times as a practical necessity, 
first began to be a real menace to music. 



IV 

The long life of Heinrich Schiitz very nearly bridges over 
the century which yawns between the death of Palestrina 
and the birth of Bach ; for Schiitz lived to be eighty-seven, 
and Bach and Handel were born in 1685, exactly a century 
after him. In dwelling so long upon Schiitz we do no 
great injustice to German music of the seventeenth cen- 
tury ; but it was not from him and his unworldly tribe 
that music could learn a universal language. Bach's 
music seems to us typically German ; indeed his choral 
works, which vastly outnumber his instrumental music, 
proved quite impracticable even in his own country when 
he was no longer alive to conduct their performance; 
and, a century after his death, much of the finest charac- 
teristics of his style seemed merely provincial to the very 
musicians who rediscovered him. Yet, as has been already 
remarked, all his art-forms are Italian and French, except 
those that consist of the polyphonic treatment of German 
chorales. And we have seen that the polyphonic treatment 
of German chorales is exactly the same as the treatment 
of Gregorian melodies by the Flemish, Roman, and Spanish 



MUSIC 268 

masters of the sixteenth century : indeed the German word 
Choral-gesang itself does not recognise any distinction 
between Lutheran or popular and Roman or ecclesiastical. 
Not even Bach's Passions, any more than those of Schiitz, 
derive their design from sources which cannot be ultimately 
traced to the Roman Offices for Holy Week. Two other 
elements in Bach's art appear to be of French origin ; these 
are the French overture and the dance forms of the suite. 
But, after all, Lulli, the classical organiser of the French 
opera and ballet, was an Italian, and there is nothing in his 
French overtures which may not be found in the art-forms 
of his contemporaries, Alessandro Scarlatti and Corelli. In 
the last resort, Bach's art rests on the foundations established 
in Italy by a century of untiring experiment and codifica- 
tion culminating in the Neapolitan school under the leader- 
ship of Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725). It would be a 
mistake to claim for Alessandro Scarlatti that he produced 
any supremely great works of art. The irresponsible genre- 
pieces of his son Domenico retain far more vitality at the 
present day. But it is quite impossible to exaggerate 
Alessandro's importance in musical history. There is no 
lack of sobriety in calling him the chief organiser of the 
language of classical music as it subsisted from the end of 
the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
In only one direction have Bach and Handel a technical 
power, the full development of which they cannot be said 
to owe to the standards set by Alessandro Scarlatti ; and 
that is a direction which, from their time onwards, appears 
to be a specially German talent. It may be defined as a 
talent for composition from within, or as the effect of 
German Innerlichkeit upon the whole nature and growth of 
musical form. Before the time of Bach and Handel the 
talent for composition in music — composition in the uni- 
versal sense in which we apply it to prose or to painting, 
was a gift which rarely deserted the ItaHans except in the 
earliest efforts of the monodic school. Long-windedness 
was a Flemish vice. Patchiness and shortness of breath 



264 GERMAN CULTURE 

were failings common to England, France, and Germany. 
Perfect ease of movement was an Italian characteristic 
shared only by Spain, where it was apt to slacken into 
indolence. But throughout the seventeenth century there 
are signs in German music of a new quality of movement 
which, long before it attains ease, shows itself as power. 
And when the struggles of the seventeenth century were 
accomplished, and music came to maturity in the work of 
Bach and Handel, this power of movement became, once 
for all, the most subtle and compelling quahty in classical 
music ; and though only the five or six greatest composers 
of all time have possessed the whole secret of this power, 
yet their example has compelled all musicians, from the 
time of Bach to that of Wagner, to regard any evident 
weakness of movement as a fatal defect in a composition. 
This standard of power is set entirely by Germany ; yet 
there is little or no trace, either in musical history or in 
methods of teaching, that Germany or other nations were 
conscious of its existence while it was being maintained. 
In the time of Palestrina, power of movement was precisely 
what Germany lacked, and a thorough familiarity with the 
whole range of sixteenth-century musical thought is neces- 
sary before we can appreciate the fact that Palestrina's 
and Victoria's unfailing mastery of movement is positive 
power, and not mere ease. But the movement of later Italian 
masters — the movement, indeed, of composers whom the 
greatest Germans themselves revered and studied as classics — 
no longer satisfies us as a quality of the highest art when 
Germany, in the eighteenth century, takes the leadership 
of music. It is no longer enough that the movement of a 
composition shall not be awkward or dragging. A Giottesque 
solidity has come, into the musical perspective, and, once 
appreciated, it becomes a sine qua non even to artists who can 
get no nearer to it than a mechanical knack will bring them. 
The art-forms perfected in Italy by the beginning of 
the eighteenth century gave an almost infallible security 
to the composer's listener's sense of movement and 



MUSIC 265 

coherence. The forms based on old polyphonic principles 
became easily controlled by the taste and tact which the 
more melodic forms of the aria, the sonata, and the con- 
certo fostered ; fugues and ricerare did not cease to be 
written, nor did they become corrupted by alien elements ; 
but they did cease to be interminable, and, while avoiding 
the outward symmetry of the newer forms, they arranged 
their own resources more and more with a sense of unity 
and climax. There is no single code by which the fugue 
became a mature classical art-form : the rules given in 
technical treatises are based on the convenience of teachers 
and students, and any fugue by a great composer that 
complies with even a bare majority of them, has complied 
by pure accident. It is a literal fact that there is not one 
fugue in the whole works of Bach and Handel that can by 
any stretch of imagination be fitted to the scheme accepted 
by teachers on the authority of Cherubini. This is no very 
grave scandal, for the truth is that fugue is a texture 
rather than a form, and a teacher cannot reasonably expect 
a pupil to write fugues without laying down a form for 
them as well as rules for the texture. But it is rather 
scandalous that when Bach himself writes a work called 
Die Kunst der Fuge, consisting of a series of fugues, all on 
the same theme and arranged in a perfectly clear and 
logical classification, subsequent theorists should completely 
ignore his whole scheme and quote from the work only such 
isolated facts as may seem to support Cherubini's. Die 
Kunst der Fuge classifies fugues entirely by their degrees 
of complexity in texture ; it pays no heed to the easy pre- 
sumption that the rhetorical force of a contrapuntal device 
must vary directly as its technical ingenuity ; and the 
" eight essential elements '' of Cherubini's fugue appear one 
by one in the course of Bach's series, and, as he reaches the 
more complex fugues, in many combinations; but neither 
in this quasi-didactic work nor in the whole range of his 
art do we find him showing the slightest concern to bring 
the whole " eight essentials '' into one fugue. It is not 



266 GERMAN CULTURE 

necessary to deny that he ever happens to achieve this ; 
among the many far more complex designs and combina- 
tions which he constantly carries out, it is fairly certain 
that all the eight essentials will come together. But long 
before this has been consummated, we may be sure that 
the technical complexity of the fugue-devices will be play- 
ing a very small part in the rhetoric of the whole, and the 
most complicated stretto is just as Ukely to occur quite 
early in the fugue as at the end, where the academic doctrine 
expects it to crown the edifice. In two directions the 
academic doctrines have falsified our view of music in the. 
first half of the eighteenth century. They have blindedf! 
us to the freedom and variety of form in those composi- 
tions which, by single devotion to the principles of fugue- 
texture, have earned the title of fugue; and they have 
failed to give us any hint of the ubiquity of fugue-texture- 
in many art-forms that are based on other principles. One 
result of this is that it becomes possible for serious writers 
on music to talk as if Bach's constant use of contrapuntal 
movement was a peculiar mannerism either of his style or 
of his epoch, and even to speak of his '' obsession " thereby 
as a defect in his art. It will be time to treat such views 
with respect when classical scholars begin to treat the 
properties of quantitative verse as the private mannerism 
of a few ancient Greeks and Romans who could have done 
better if they had been large-minded enough to appreciate 
the superiority of stress and rhyme. 

In spite of the imperturbable stability of the Italian 
aria and concerto as forms founded on melody and solo- 
singing or solo-playing, music was still a contrapuntal 
language on which other than contrapuntal forms of 
obtaining movement had so obviously disruptive an effect 
that they actually were used avowedly to that end. The 
rhapsodical beginnings and interludes of the toccata 
show this very clearly ; the form owes its name to its 
realistic imitation of the behaviour of an organist or 
harpsichordist trying the touch of his instrument, be- 




MUSIC 267 

ning with a capricious alternation of runs and sustained 
chords until he feels that he knows the instrument well 
icnough to settle down to a fugue. Bach's toccatas are the 
first and last that settle down to fugues in which the swing and 
power are steady enough to satisfy the demands of the intro- 
duction and interludes ; and the abruptness and grotesqueness 
of his introduction is proportionate to the triumph of his end. 
Another art-form opposed to counterpoint is that of reci- 
tative, the vocal formulas of which remained with surpris- 
ingly little alteration from the time of the early monodists 
to the early days of Wagner. In polyphonic instrumental 
music we often find features analogous to the dissolution 
of rhythm in recitative : the rhapsodic portions of the 
toccata give us the typical case, and the title recitativo 
is occasionally given by Bach to instrumental passages of 
that type, though he never uses the vocal formulas except 
for voices. Even in his vocal recitatives he has a set of 
formulas that are obviously not Italian, but German ; they 
coincide with the Italian forms only in so far as the declama- 
tion of the German language encourages them to do so. 
It is interesting to see how in his own lifetime, his son, 
C. Philipp Emmanuel Bach, not only broke often into 
essentially vocal recitative in his sonatas, but always re- 
verted to the purely Italian formulas. 

Recitative and toccata-passages, however, presuppose 
by their very violence that the listener does not demand 
" relief from the steady grind of counterpoint," but that 
the steadiness of contrapuntal movement is peace, and the 
interruption of it something like war. The conception that 
textures unattractive and primitive in themselves may by 
mutual contrast fill a higher function in a great piece of 
music than either counterpoint or declamation — this con- 
ception could arise only through another musical revolu- 
tion, less chaotic in immediate results, but in origin far 
more Philistine than that of the seventeenth-century mono- 
dists. In the lifetime of Bach and Handel it simply was 
not true, and no subsequent progress can make it true as 



268 GERMAN CULTURE 

a criterion for their works. It is only in archaic and 
transitional periods that the progress of art is the progress* 
from something imperfect towards an ideal (and pre- 
sumably unattainable) perfection. A classical period is one 
in which the artist has perfect command of a language 
that can express his thoughts. If a priori theories incul- 
cate that a perfect work of art is impossible, the practical 
experience of a classical artist's language constantly shows 
that the cleverest attacks on a classical masterpiece are 
liable to failure on some elementary misunderstanding of 
the meaning of the work. The term '' progress " cannot be 
made to comprehend the art of two different mature 
classical epochs unless we understand by it that in one 
epoch the language of the art succeeded in perfectly ex- 
pressing ideas within a certain range, that this range itself 
contained no distracting elements, and that in the other 
epoch the language of the art was equally successful in 
dealing with a different range of ideas equally free from 
distracting elements. We cannot even assume that the 
progress lies in an increase of range, for even if the later 
range is, as it probably must be, wider than the old, the 
increase of range may itself prevent the new art from 
directly manifesting anything like the grandeur of the old. 
This is unmistakably the case with Haydn and Mozart; 
the first eight bars of any mature Haydn quartet will 
contain features that would be quite inadmissible in Bach's 
style, and these features will amply justify their existence 
in the sequel, and will carry the listener into a world com- 
pared with which Bach's must seem like "Flatland" com- 
pared with space in three dimensions. Yet Haydn's quartet, 
even in its most serious passages, never attempts to suggest 
the breadth and solem.nity of Bach's larger designs. Un- 
doubtedly the opening of Haydn's Creation, from the intro- 
ductory " Representation of Chaos " to the outburst on the 
words "And there was light" is sublime, and can be be- 
littled by no comparisons; but as soon as "A new-created 
world springs up at God's command," Haydn strikes a note 



MUSIC 269 

which would be purely jocular for Bach, but which in 
Haydn's own new-created world rises from the chaos as a 
perfect expression of his sublime childlike confidence that 
" God will not be angry with me for worshipping Him with 
a cheerful heart." The sublimity of Haydn and Mozart is 
a lesson their contemporaries, who did not understand 
Bach, found easier to learn than we, whom later musical 
developments and revolutions have plunged back into a 
crude preoccupation with the " subjects '' of musical composi- 
tions instead of with the compositions as wholes. But 
before we pursue this topic or attempt to define the revolu- 
tion by which the art of Haydn and Mozart succeeded to 
that of Bach and Handel, it is necessary to give a summary 
catalogue raisonne of Bach's and Handel's works, for they 
belong, not to the mere history of music, but to the ends 
for which the fine arts have a history. 

Handel is known to the modern public by his two 
greatest oratorios, The Messiah and Israel in Egypt; by 
occasional performances of some other oratorios ; by select 
arias and choruses from all of them; by some charming 
secular choral works, of which ^cis and Galatea, Semele, and 
Alexander's Feast are decidedly the most important; by 
many arias which time has quite capriciously sifted from 
the vast collection of his Italian operas; and by a large 
quantity of instrumental music which is now universally 
regarded as showing little beyond the lightest side of his work. 
On the whole, this selection that is known to the public 
represents Handel very fairly, though it does not amount to 
one-tenth of the bulk of his works. If Handel is misrepre- 
.sented in what the public knows of him, the misrepresenta- 
tion lies mainly in certain traditions of performance. The 
selection is intelligent enough, though a certain amount of 
what Handel himself would have called rubbish has become 
the object of the same reverential gratitude as the greatest 
things in The Messiah, But his native country has per- 
haps been quicker than his adopted nation to rediscover 
the fact that he has great powers of clear and accurate 



270 GERMAN CULTURE 

characterisation in secular music and in such parts of his 
oratorios as give scope for it. The mammoth perform- 
ances of our Handel Festivals reduce all this to the solemnity 
of Scripture lessons as read in a cathedral where nothing is 
audible unless it is intoned ; and when English critics dis- 
cover that the humour of Handel's character-drawing is 
not entirely unconscious, the shock provokes them to say 
that after all he was a "pagan," and this is considered 
high praise. But the man who could say that he hoped to 
die on Good Friday, in order to rise with his Maker on 
Easter Day, must have been an atrociously dishonest pagan 
if this, and the style of "He was despised" and the 
Hallelujah Chorus did not represent his inmost feelings. 
And it is quite untrue that these solemn things have less 
freshness and beauty than his pagan choruses and arias. 
There is quite as much dullness in his pagan as in his 
Christian w^ork, only our interest in the pagan aspect is 
fresher. There is no dishonesty in Handel's opportunism; 
his immense physical industry enabled him to give the 
public what it wanted, but his intellectual indolence never 
prevented him from rising to the height of any subject that 
was propounded to him, and, indeed, it probably safeguarded 
him from taking a cynical attitude towards his art, as more 
than one great artist who can command Handelian bluff 
has been sorely tempted to do in times of transition when 
fashion is the only paymaster. 

For many years after Handel's death his fame continued 
to rest at least as much on his operas as on his oratorios. 
Burney's reverence for Handel as a writer of religious choral 
music is expressed in much the same dutiful tone as one 
would use in speaking of the good works the Reverend Sydney 
Smith accomplished in his parish ; it is evident that Bumey 
turns with relief to the elegance and splendour of Handel's 
operatic triumphs. This we find difficult to reconcile with 
Burney's undoubtedly intelligent sympathy with Gluck, to 
whom, as to us, Handelian opera was but the embalmed 
corpse of Italian dramatic music. We have forgotten how 



MUSIC 271 

much more important it seemed to contemporaries that 
music should go on than that opera should be reformed. 
The ItaHan aria was the one all-pervading art-form in which 
every composer, every singer, and almost every player 
could shine. Solo-singing was in a state of acrobatic 
plasticity which stimulated the composer to over-produc- 
tion and discouraged him from subtlety of invention, much 
in the same way as the "gagging" comedian forces the 
dramatic author to become a mere scaffold-builder. Yet 
Handel never allowed his singers to dictate to him ; when 
the greatest prima donna in Europe tried to give herself 
other airs than those he wrote for her, he threatened to 
throw her out of the window ; and when the other greatest 
prima donna in Europe was in London at the same time^ 
he performed the incredible feat of getting them to sing 
together in the same opera, until the public, finding this 
sport better than cock-fighting, spoilt it by taking sides. 

The greatness which we fail (and pardonably fail) to see 
in all this musical dandyism, lay in its perfect command of 
the resources of extemporisation; every aria had a huge 
da capo, no matter how pressing the dramatic situation, 
and it was a point of honour for the singer to produce a 
different set of ornaments on the repetition; the harpsi- 
chord, at which the composer or conductor sat, not only 
filled out the unwritten harmonies throughout the whole 
opera, but was ready at any moment to increase the 
dramatic tension by a long cadenza, A famous trumpeter 
once rashly tried to convince the public that he could 
sustain a note longer than Farinelli ; the trumpeter kept up 
appearances by breaking into a trill before finally expiring 
(in the technical sense), but Farinelli won by at least forty 
bars. This is ridiculous enough, but there is abundant 
evidence that these artists were great rhetoricians of a 
higher order; and it is very probable that the unique 
simplicity of Handel's style in sustained melody was in- 
spired largely by his imagination of what such voices and 
vocal methods could express by sheer beauty and modula- 



272 GERMAN CULTURE 

tion of tone without any airs and graces whatever. Un- 
doubtedly there are whole arias and passages in which the 
written text is a mere skeleton, the simpUcity of which 
proves nothing ; but it is no delusion of custom that makes 
us feel that "Where'er you walk," "Angels ever bright 
and fair," to say nothing of "He was despised," have a 
true and perfect simplicity which is utterly intolerant of 
ornamentation. The great German scholar Chrysander 
has done the world an inestimable service in rescuing the 
text of Handel's works from nearly two centuries of de- 
generating tradition ; but here his research parts company 
with musical instinct, and he eagerly reproduces the most 
deplorable ornaments from Italian singing masters of the 
eighteenth century, as if vulgarity were a mere question 
of date. The moral is, that the greatest of composers 
owes an obligation to his own thoughts to record them in 
terms which shall cover every precaution he can reasonably 
be expected to take against their sense becoming lost when 
his personal control of their execution ceases. 

All the music of the first half of the eighteenth century 
was written on conditions that blinded composers to any sense 
of duty on this point. We are astounded at the immense 
industry of Handel and Bach, but it was not exceptional in 
their day. The main difference between Bach's output and 
that of such a famous contemporary as Telemann lies in this, 
that Bach's works proved, when rediscovered, to be like 
dramas of which we have every word of the text in perfect 
order and correctly assigned to the characters, but the 
stage directions are wanting; whereas Telemann's equally 
voluminous works give us nothing but scenarios. To con- 
temporaries this would bear the construction that Bach 
was an exasperating pedant whose lack of confidence in his 
performers was justified only by his complete inability to 
write for them in a practical style. His almost super- 
human skill as an organist was universally admitted, but 
no connoisseur would have considered it an excuse for so 
tasteless a conception as a vocal and instrumental style 



MUSIC 273 

that should throughout have a yet closer and richer texture 
than the most elaborate organ music. Why could he not 
learn artistic common sense from a practical man like 
Telemann, to say nothing of the great Hasse, whom Handel 
in his later operas condescended to imitate, and the not 
less great Graun (author of Der Tod Jesu, a very beautiful 
and still presentable Passion oratorio), from whom Handel 
(to save time) stole a whole chorus in Esther? We, of 
course, find all the practical common sense on the side of 
Bach. There are abundant difficulties in reviving his 
choral music : obsolete instruments ; misconceptions and 
miscalculations as to the almost lost art of filling out a 
"figured bass"; the absence of directions which modem 
performers need on points which could not have seemed 
ambiguous to contemporaries ; the total reversal of acoustic 
relations when chorus and orchestra are on a concert plat- 
form instead of in an organ gallery at the end of a church ; 
these and many other obstacles meet us, but research, ex- 
periment, and practice remove them one and all ; for in no 
case where the manuscript is completely preserved do we 
find that Bach has left out the essentials of his thought. 

The most difiicult problem is, of course, that of the 
figured bass, which was always filled out extempore on a 
keyed instrument. It relieved the early eighteenth-century 
composer of a host of problems that occupy all later com- 
posers with the balance of tone in the background of the 
harmony. And at first sight an aria like "Quia fecit 
mihi magna," in Bach's Magnificat certainly seems in- 
complete, consisting as it does of a bare instrumental 
bass supporting a bass voice. But in all such cases it 
will be found that the instrumental bass is exactly as 
melodious as the voice part, and that it would be the 
greatest possible mistake for the harmonic background to 
distract attention from it, though this "background" must 
lie above it throughout the whole piece. Here, in fact, we 
see Bach making excellent sense of a device which had 
been slowly maturing from the early days of monody ; he 



274 GERMAN CULTURE 

raises to a definite art-form the "speaking bass" which 
Heinrich Schiitz showed us in its years of indiscretion. 
WTien the particular bass part that contains the figures is 
lost, then the case is unfortunate, but not so desperate as 
might be thought ; for there are not many even plausible 
different ways of harmonising an elaborate melody that 
lies in the bass, and where there is an alternative there is 
plenty of evidence elsewhere in Bach's works that he would 
welcome a variety each time the passage recurs. All this 
is on quite a different footing from the habit of leaving 
blank spaces in the design of an aria or recitative, so that 
the singer may extemporise cadenzas. Handel, Bach, and 
Beethoven were undoubtedly the greatest extemporisers 
music has ever known ; and Bach is the first composer 
who in his instrumental works and vocal solos relegated 
extemporisation to the background. 

The work of Handel which survives and entitles 
him to his place among the greatest of artists, is, when 
we come to reckon it up on this basis, literally the 
work which he condescended to record. He could not 
leave the details of a chorus to be extemporised in 
performance, no matter how pressed for time he might 
be ; so when he was in a hurry with a chorus he had to 
choose between copying an old one or composing a new 
one, details and all. No contemporary could be expected 
to see the immense difference between the work which, for 
whatever reason, was put on a permanent basis, and that 
in which most of the inspiration lay in the performance. 
Utter oblivion has now engulfed all Handel's operas, and 
has cast up only a dozen or so of arias which seem much 
happier in their present freedom than in their original 
context. Handelian opera has been described as "the 
darkness before the dawn " of dramatic music, and Handel 
has been sternly denounced for wasting the prime of his 
life in upholding the tyranny of its conventions. But it is 
quite possible that Gluck would have had far more diffi- 
culty in achieving the reform of opera if no great master had 



MUSIC 275 

kept it alive in its unregenerate state. The real question 
at issue was not whether Handelian opera was an un- 
dramatic monstrosity, but whether music could be or ought 
to be dramatic at all. Bach evidently thought not ; he 
held aloof from opera, and his music is dramatic only in 
the metaphorical sense in which epic poetry, scenery, or 
the situation of a castle is dramatic. Actual drama requires 
of music a capacity for changes of movement and texture 
which are obviously illegitimate on the terms of either 
Bach's or Handel's musical language. Handel's easy 
eclectic methods enabled him to advance with his times : 
it has been already mentioned that in his later operas he 
began to imitate Hasse, whose technique forms in many 
respects a link between Handel's and Mozart's ; but the 
link was merely a fatal weakness in the chain. Where 
Handel imitates Hasse he is more than usually perfunctory, 
and Mozart's devotion to Hasse as a model begins in his 
seventh year and becomes unrecognisable before his sixteenth. 
In gaining a certain kind of freedom and variety of 
movement, the progress represented in vocal music by 
Hasse (whose wife was the great singer Faustina), and, 
somewhat later, in instrumental music by Boccherini, meant 
little more than the loss of the architectural character and 
power of those art-forms that had so far been perfected. 
No one before Mozart seems to have grasped this except 
Bach, Gluck, and Haydn. Bach saw the inmost character 
of the old forms, and by cultivating a very strict sense of 
the special allure and structure of each he acquired as a 
normal mark of his style that power and inevitableness of 
movement which Handel shows only in his most inspired 
pages. Not that Handel's work ever breaks down as the 
work of seventeenth-century composers almost always did ; 
but too often Handel wall begin a piece beautifully and 
then let it merely roll by gravity down to its long-winded 
but obvious conclusion ; whereas Bach at his most ordinary 
level is himself interested in his task, and does not fail to 
communicate his interest to us if we repeat his experiment 



276 GERMAN CULTURE 

by producing his work under proper conditions. If as 
much as one- tenth of Bach's complete works is markedly 
inferior to the other nine-tenths, that is a large estimate. 
Certainly not one-tenth of his choral work is widely known, 
but, apart from the obviously monumental B minor Mass 
and Passions, there is nothing but accident to determine 
why this dozen rather than some other dozen of the two- 
hundred-odd cantatas should have become specially famous 
since their pubUcation began in 1851. His instrumental 
music was not so long lost from sight by cultivated 
musicians ; within twenty-five years of Bach's death, Mozart 
was exploring the Wohltemperirtes Clavier ; and Beethoven 
knew it by heart, though there is evidence that he mis- 
construed it on almost every possible point where our 
completer knowledge of Bach's style can throw light. In 
England Samuel Wesley was ahead of all Europe in his 
enthusiasm for Bach. The rediscovery and publication of 
Bach's choral works, which we owe primarily to the impulse 
of Mendelssohn, is nothing less than the discovery of a 
complete musical language, an aesthetic system hardly less 
exclusive and coherent than the most perfect single work of 
art produced under its laws ; a system, moreover, which is 
in no way imposed on the works from without, but which 
has been as surely and habitually made afresh by each 
single work as a living body makes its own bones and organs 
and muscular and nervous systems. If we wish to find 
the meaning of some early eighteenth-century art-form in 
perfect and purely musical clearness, we shall find it in 
Bach. If we wish to understand what some struggling 
musical prophet of the seventeenth century had in view, 
we shall find his wildest visions realised, in a far more 
astonishing because perfectly convincing form, by Bach. 
And we shall constantly find our most modern ideas antici- 
pated by him. But what makes him the most modem of 
all classics is just his accurate sense of the limitations of 
his language and of its art-forms. He can never give us 
an antiquated answer to an artistic question, for he brings 



MUSIC 277 

all questions into the limits set by his own art, and then 
tells the whole truth within those limits. If we ask him, 
" Can music move in such a way as to deal with dramatic 
action ? " his answer is, " I do not write operas." 



Mere ease of movement could not suffice to solve the 
problem of making music genuinely dramatic ; but at the 
outset ease was more important than power. Bach's music 
moves like the stars in their courses ; such power is beyond 
the reach of dramatic music until it has grown to its fullest 
Wagnerian stature. Gluck (1714-1787) learnt his technique 
in Italy in a school not radically different from that of Handel, 
if Handel can be said to have had a school. Sammartini 
trained Gluck to write operas which, w^hen produced in 
England, elicited from Handel the remark, " Gluck knows 
no more counterpoint than my cook." The criticism was 
true and, as applied to Gluck's early work, quite fair. 
Handel's cook happened to be a very good singer, and 
Gluck's first operas have no dramatic merits to compensate 
for their poor texture. The important thing which he 
learnt from Sammartini was neither counterpoint nor a 
truly dramatic style, but a certain special interest in the 
effects of vague masses of contrasted tone obtainable rather 
at the expense of real polyphony than with its aid. This 
kind of musical impressionism had been a feature of Italian 
instrumental music from its earliest times ; the concerto 
grosso was an art-form in which it had free scope ; and 
Handel's more indolent overtures and concertos show it as 
a concession to popular taste ; but Gluck learned from 
Sammartini's chamber-music that what is mere daubing in 
an easel picture may be high art in scene-painting, and 
that the word " theatrical " as a term of abuse loses much 
of its force when applied to the stage. 

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Gluck's 
achievement in dramatic music ; indeed its bearing on the 



278 GERMAN CULTURE 

nature of music in general has been rather ignored than 
over-emphasized. But Gluck's own claims have been 
treated with far too simple a faith in his accuracy and in 
the simpHcity of the operatic problem. In the first place, 
a very large part of the problem must be solved in the 
poetry before a note of the music can be written ; and 
here Gluck owes a great debt to his librettist Calzabigi, 
who had the courage to revolt against the authority of the 
all-powerful Metastasio, a poet who still commands the 
respect of students of Italian literature though all his works 
were written as the libretti of operas, not one of which 
could now be successfully revived. In the second place, 
Gluck was very much the same kind of opportunist as 
Handel, though he had so clear a consciousness of his 
dramatic mission. He had, when inspired by a favourable 
dramatic situation or emotion, a really sublime vein of 
melody, but no great technical mastery either of counter- 
point or of connecting links between one idea and another. 
Here his lessons in Italian impressionism proved very 
useful ; indeed they are summed up in his own statement 
in the famous and doctrinal preface to Alceste, "that the 
number and character of the instruments ought to vary with 
the passions and climaxes of the drama," instead of forming 
purely decorative designs as in the works of Bach and Handel. 
All this might make even his maturest work still seem 
helpless child's-play to a solid polyphonic master like 
Handel (who, of course, saw only his earliest works) ; but 
it forced him to economise his energies in many ways 
which require some explanation before they can be har- 
monised with the popular notion of Gluck as an eighteenth- 
century Wagner. History deplores that long after his first 
" reformed " operas he continued to earn an honest living 
with works in the bad old style ; research shows that his 
greatest operas draw freely upon these presumably repre- 
hensible works for quite important features. The famous 
Parisian war between the Gluckists and the Piccinnists is 
often supposed to be a contest between the new opera and 



MUSIC 279 

the old. Piccinni's own avowals, no less than his music, 
show that he was only too anxious to imitate Gluck in 
any points on which his own gifts and the incessant 
pamphlets and criticisms of the time could enlighten him. 
As a matter of fact, the whole controversy was on no clearer 
issue than that between French and Italian music ; in the 
reign of Louis XIV French music was represented by the 
Italian LuUi, and now, in the reign of Louis XVI, it was 
represented by the Austrian Gluck. Germany and German- 
speaking musicians still had much to learn from Italy; 
but in the essentials of dramatic music both Germany and 
Italy were now to find in French criticism their greatest 
stimulus. We must admit this, but at the same time we 
must not forget that Gluck's first three reformed operas, 
Orfeo, Alceste, and Paride ed Elena, were produced in Italy 
before he came to Paris. Orfeo is the most perfect of all 
Gluck's works ; it was already so in its Italian version, 
and it lost more than it gained when it was forcibly adapted 
to the French conditions of performance. Alceste was so 
rewritten for Paris that an entirely new work would prob- 
ably have given Gluck less trouble ; it created great 
controversy, and Gluck learnt more from his experiences 
with it than from all the rest of his life's work. Iphigenie 
en Aulide and Iphigenie en Tauride are very great works ; 
they show the fruits of his experience with Alceste. Neither 
of them maintains throughout the grandeur of invention 
which distinguishes Alceste, and both show occasional signs 
that the doctrinaire dominates the musician without much 
gain to the drama. There is fine psychology, worthy of 
Wagner's subtlest use of Leitmotif, in the famous passage in 
Iphigenie en Tauride where Orestes gasps, '' Le calme rentre 
dans mon coeur," while the agitated orchestra belies him; 
but the greatest things in Orfeo and Alceste are just as true 
to life and infinitely harder to describe in words. Armide 
is the last of Gluck's great works, for Echo et Narcisse is a 
failure. The most remarkable external fact to note about 
Armide is that Gluck here found it possible to set without 



280 GERMAN CULTURE 

much alteration a libretto by Quinault that had served 
LuUi ninety years before. There is more pageantry than 
pathos to be obtained from even the most natural treat- 
ment of the subject ; and Quinault's poem had great 
merits. But Gluck's magnificent success with it shews 
that the problem of opera could be solved with material 
that was very different from any that would have met 
with his approval in the first days of his greatness when 
he worked with Calzabigi. 

Meanwhile a transformation was taking place in instru- 
mental music. It is impossible to say whether Gluck's 
dramatic power or the new sense of movement in the 
symphony and sonata came first in point of time. But 
quite certainly neither consummation would have been 
effected without the other. The transformation in operatic 
music is the easiest subject to discuss ; but, as in the 
monodic revolution a hundred and fifty years earlier, it 
hides the purely musical facts in billowing clouds of litera- 
ture. The radical change in the inmost nature of music 
itself is clearly revealed only in the history of the sonata, a 
term which happens to be applied only to solos and duets, 
but which quite accurately covers the universal form of 
almost all instrumental music, including trios and sym- 
phonies, from the time of Bach's own sons to the time of 
Brahms, and even, among composers who have not quarrelled 
with classical traditions, to the present day. 

Instrumental compositions had been called sonatas from 
the earliest days when a term was needed to distinguish 
music that was merely *' sounded " or played, from cantatas 
which were sung ; and Bach, like all his contemporaries 
and predecessors, uses the term for art-forms as purely 
decorative in scope and polyphonic in texture as the rest 
of his work. But when we nowadays speak of the " sonata 
style " we mean something wholly undreamt of by any 
Latin artist, though the Italians furnished the entire raw 
material for its technique, and something wholly untouched 
by Bach, though he not only used its formal outhnes on a 



MUSIC 281 

small scale, but definitely encouraged his sons to regard his 
own art as obsolete. His own words, spoken without any 
bitterness, were "The art has attained a very high posi- 
tion ; the old style of music no longer appeals to our ears." 
Only in Germany could an artist so generously acknowledge 
the success of a new train of thought definitely hostile to 
his own methods ; and only Bach could continue to the 
hour of his death to develop his own ideas as if the acknow- 
ledged high position of the new art concerned them no 
more than the acknowledged high position of the Emperor 
of China concerned Frederick the Great. Sebastian Bach 
has his reward now ; and in our indignation at the 
eighteenth-century connoisseurs who ignored Sebastian, but 
gave Philipp Emmanuel Bach (1714-1788) almost as much 
sympathy as he deserved, we are apt to show great 
injustice to a sincere and subtle artist who faithfully obeyed 
his father's advice and earned the boundless reverence of 
Mozart, who used unprintable language about any musician 
who did not see in Phihpp Emmanuel Bach his spiritual 
father. Beethoven, too, regarded him as a classic. 

As so often happens in artistic history, the works of 
Philipp Emmanuel which have most clearly made history 
are not among his best works of art. The track ceases to be 
new when it is properly beaten ; and when we are following 
the steps of the pioneer we are more interested in the traces 
of the woodman's axe than in the beauty of the scenery. 
There is one way in which belated justice might be done 
to Philipp Emmanuel, and that is a way which would also 
go far to placate the outraged manes of Mozart and Haydn. 
We use the "easy" pianoforte works of these two great 
masters as school-music for children ; and the difficult early 
sonatas of Beethoven are also turned to the same purpose. 
With Haydn there is something to be said for this plan, though 
the easiness of his best works is treacherous ; but Mozart 
is never really easy except in slow movements, and in his 
pianoforte sonatas these, like Haydn's, are mostly a style 
which is neither intelHgible to children at the moment nor 



282 GERMAN CULTURE 

calculated to lay down a store of early impressions that may 
acquire meaning to them in later life. Instead of spoiling 
Haydn and Mozart by familiarising children with a selec- 
tion that totally misrepresents their styles and makes them 
odiously difficult as well as childishly ineffective, why do 
we not revive in musical education the true life's work of 
Philipp Emmanuel Bach ? It is genuinely easy, for diffi- 
culties are avoided with that sketchiness which was to 
contemporaries the supreme virtue of artistic tact, though 
to us it is a flaw fatal to the permanent perfection of art ; 
but with all its sketchiness, the best of it yields results far 
fuller and more satisfactory to young ears and comfortable 
to small hands than the pianoforte parerga of Mozart and 
Haydn, which the ripest artists find full of subtle treachery. 
Again, Philipp Emmanuel Bach's style combines an almost 
boyish rhetorical enthusiasm with a truly poetic pathos 
more exactly suited to the comprehension of children than 
any other musical experience except that of listening to 
great music without thinking of sharing in its performance. 
If musical children were allowed to learn an artistic and 
not merely historical selection of the works of PhiHpp 
Emmanuel Bach, they would come to understand both his 
father and his spiritual descendants through a language 
into which he put his whole enthusiasm, a language which 
links the old art with the new and cannot possibly spoil 
the taste for either. 

It would be a mistake to ascribe the whole revolution 
in instrumental music to Phihpp Emmanuel Bach as we 
undoubtedly must ascribe to Gluck the revolution in opera. 
More than one of Sebastian Bach's other numerous sons 
had a share in the matter, and Gluck himself, by his de- 
votion to opera, gave a concrete and extra-musical inter- 
pretation of problems which, if strictly confined to " abso- 
lute " music, might have become so abstract as to lose 
meaning. In point of fact, out of the singularly rapid and 
quiet revolution which separates the age of Bach and 
Handel from that which has been aptly called the Viennese 



MUSIC 283 

period, there arose neither more nor less than the unques- 
tionable supremacy of " absolute " music. Sebastian 
Bach's instrumental works are indeed among the greatest 
things in art, and for over a century they were the only 
music by which he was known ; so that Germany may be 
said to have achieved in him that undisputed command of 
music in its completest purity which she still retained 
within recent memory in the person of Brahms, whose 
legitimate successor is believed by a wide circle of serious 
musicians to be Max Reger, But the discovery of Bach's 
choral works proved that not even his greatest instrumental 
music attains the highest summit of his art ; it may demand 
higher faculties in the listener than those which suffice for 
the enjoyment of the most complex choral work, but 
Bach's choral work does not give the highest faculties any 
the less scope in consequence of its intelligibility on a lower 
and less purely musical plane. On the contrary, all his 
art-forms, except the toccata, the arpeggio-prelude, and the 
suite, attain their full scope in choral music. With Mozart 
(1756-1 791), Haydn (1732-1809), and Beethoven (1770-1827) 
this is no longer true, nor can we argue that what has hap- 
pened is a decline in choral art. Mozart's choral technique 
is fully equal to Bach's or Handel's ; indeed it combines 
the contrapuntal richness of the one with the practical 
convenience of the other. The only reason why it 
so rarely utters anything worthy of its powers is that 
Mozart's main interest lies elsewhere. In the problems of 
comic opera he found scope for faculties greater and more 
subtle than even the tragic power of Gluck ; and it is a 
cardinal error of criticism to suppose that Figaro and Don 
Giovanni are less great than they would have been if their 
subjects had been solemn, or if, being what they are, the 
music had made the most of their capacity as a vehicle of 
social satire. Nor is the " absolute musician " nearer to 
the truth when he says that Mozart's operas owe to their 
contemptible libretti only the freedom to become absolute 
music by disregarding their text. Like all the greatest music 



284 GERMAN CULTURE 

from Palestrina to the last seven works of Wagner, Mozart' 
music neglects nothing that comes within its range ; with- 
out the aid of any a priori theory it instinctively and 
inexorably searches out the truth, and its life is as wonderful 
as the grasp of a baby's hands. To turn from Mozart and 
Haydn to Beethoven is like turning from the contemplation 
of childhood to that of manhood ; but it has no sort of 
resemblance to the duty of " putting away childish things." 
A subject apparently so trivial and so remote from serious 
literature as the musical and dramatic resources and 
problems of Mozart's wretched libretti proved quite im- 
portant enough to occupy years of the devoted research of 
Otto Jahn, no mere musician, but one of the greatest 
classical scholars modern Germany and modern scholarship 
in general has known. Such is the transfiguring power of 
great music on the most unappetising raw material that 
comes to it from without ; and this transfiguring power 
has never been shown except in as far as the music has 
completely and conscientiously absorbed that material. 

But if Mozart's operas are greater than his choral music, 
it is impossible to say that they show his greatness in as 
lofty a sphere as that of his quartets, quintets, symphonies, 
and concertos. Perhaps the operas need a higher faculty 
for their understanding at the present day ; since grave 
damage has been done by the acceptance of that doctrine 
of connoisseurship that ignores their dramatic aspect. But 
the highest faculties that find scope in Mozart's operas 
have an incomxparably wider field in his instrumental music. 
One of the easiest ways in which this may be measured is 
to take the short instrumental passage which accompanies 
the duel at the beginning of Don Giovanni, and to look for 
passages like it in Mozart's instrumental music. In the 
opera the passage is perfectly adequate to the excitement 
and calamity of the situation. In no instrumental work 
written after the age of seventeen does Mozart take such a 
passage seriously. 

One of the most insidious false impressions which infest 



I 



MUSIC 285 

our ordinary notions of classical and modem music is the 
idea that the stage demands a more intense form of musical 
expression than is legitimate in purely instnmiental music. 
This is a point on which even a student whose whole bias 
is against paradox will be compelled, as soon as he studies 
the facts, to decide that the truth is exactly contrary to 
popular opinion. Away from the stage the effect of stagi- 
ness is invariably cold, not necessarily because we " see 
through it " and think it extravagant, but always because, 
whether this be so or not, it is inadequate. And on the 
stage the composer's chief difficulties may be brought under 
two categories : firstly, those which arise from the fact 
that a little dramatic expression in music goes an incal- 
culably long way ; and secondly, those which concern the 
control of the movement of the music. In Mozart's operas 
both these types of problem are solved with an exquisite 
tact by the aid of devices and forms which are never so 
dangerous a stumbling-block for hasty criticism as where 
they seem most conventional. Throughout his short career 
his vision of the inner nature of music seems to become 
steadily clearer in whatever art-form he works, until in 
that strange masonic pantomime. Die Zauherflote, operatic 
music becomes almost as ethereal as a string quartet, and 
its most antiquated conventions, as shown in the vocal 
fireworks of the "Queen of Night,'' become subtleties of 
character-drawing and symbols of political satire. 

Before half of Beethoven's career was run the dramatic 
power of music had in his hands blazed out with an in- 
tensity that very nearly withered operatic art for ever. 
Eminent critics, and nearly all orthodox Wagnerians, have 
expressed the opinion that the music of Beethoven's Fidelio 
is not genuinely dramatic. We cannot begin to under- 
stand Fidelio imtil we face the fact an experienced master 
of opera like Mozart would never have accepted a libretto 
so elaborately designed to spoil a good story by introducing 
each piece of music at the most awkward possible moment, 
and to spoil good music by the mere effect of resuming 



286 GERMAN CULTURE 

the story. The two first versions of the work as Leonore 
in 1805 and 1806 were almost failures, but in 1814 a very 
clever dramatist made extensive improvements in the 
libretto, which, while leaving grave defects and obscurities 
in the first act, made success possible for the work as a 
whole ; so that, as Fidelio, it has become a unique feature 
in the repertoire of classical opera, successful in the teeth 
of all orthodox operatic criticism, and strangely powerful in 
its emotional effect. When critics tell us that its music is 
dramatic only as the D minor Sonata, Op. 31, No. 2, is 
dramatic, they express a truth by inversion. What they 
ought to say is that no libretto could match the tremendous 
dramatic power of Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies 
until a Wagner could arise who might have given Beethoven 
a libretto — if Beethoven had been Wagner. 

The problem may be accurately stated on an entirely 
prosaic basis thus : To act a good story on the stage is a 
matter of hours ; to go through the whole gamut of its 
emotions, subtle and great, simple and complex, in purely 
instrumental music, is a matter of ten minutes. So fierce, 
indeed is the concentration of movement and design in the 
sonata forms that a single design in the most highly 
organised of these forms cannot stand alone. The sonata 
is divided into three or four complete sections or "move- 
ments," none of which allude to the themes of the others ; 
and, historically, this division may be traced to the group- 
ing of the dance tunes in polj^^honic suites and of other 
purely decorative movements in the earher types of sonata. 
But aesthetically, the division of Haydn's, Mozart's, and 
Beethoven's large instrumental works into these sharply 
defined sections has a deeper meaning. It means that if we 
are to be whirled through the complete emotions of a drama 
in ten minutes, we must be given time to dwell upon various 
reactions from these emotions. It is as if we were told 
the story in one movement, allowed in another movement 
to live with some of its characters in their daily life, shown 
in a third a glimpse of the wider world in which they lived. 



MUSIC 287 

and so on in many different conabinations. One striking 
result of this is that though Beethoven is unmistakably the 
greatest m.aster of tragic expression music has ever known 
(being approached only by Wagner and Brahms), there are 
not more than three of his works in sonata form where the 
finale ends in gloom. The only three cases are the C sharp 
minor sonata (commonly called Moonlight), the sonata in 
F minor, Op. 57 (commonly and not inaptly called Appas- 
sionata}, and the marvellous C sharp minor quartet, which 
ranks with the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis 
as among the greatest works in all music. But it is im- 
portant to note that there is no weakness in the conclusions, 
gentle, humorous, happy, or triumphant, of other works, 
such as the quartets in F minor and A minor, the Fifth 
and Ninth Symphonies, which are rooted in quite as pro- 
found a tragic emotion as the Sonata Appassionata, The 
inexorable progress of the tragedy has been told in the 
first movement : the logic which governs the sequel is not 
the logic of cause and event, but that of emotional reaction. 
We are now in a position to see what is really meant by 
applying the term " absolute music " to such works. I 
have dwelt on the history of opera because it gives us the 
best external evidence as to what music means in so far 
as it is translatable at all. But Beethoven proved that 
utterly untranslatable music for instruments, without any 
external " programme " to guide the listener, could be a 
more powerful poetic language than had ever been dreamt 
of in art before him. Opera had already begun, in the 
hands of Rossini, to show that its surest success was com- 
patible with a grave taint of vulgarity ; and the early 
death of Weber in 1826 after his three noble triumphs, 
Der Freischiitz, Euryanthe, and Oberon, deprived music of 
the only master, except the austere Cherubini, who com- 
bined stagecraft with a musical power pure enough to 
redeem opera from the degradation into which the vigorous 
but base talent of Meyerbeer (1791-1864) was plunging it. 
Meanwhile, in Beethoven's sonatas, chamber music and 



288 GERMAN CULTURE 

symphonies, we have a perfect dramatic art before which all 
opera, except Mozart's and Wagner's, pales its ineffectual fires 
as surely as the most ideal operatic libretto must be put to 
shame by Shakespeare. For this very reason, all attempts to 
translate Beethoven's music by a " programme " are doomed 
to exasperating failure ; such translations are as futile as 
a translation of Rheims Cathedral into Greek prose. As 
an expression of a poet's mood, Shelley's poem To a Skylark 
is not less accurate for containing few statements that 
ornithology can conscientiously endorse. Poetry is some- 
times hardly less '' absolute " than music, but, like music, 
it gains instead of losing accuracy thereby; and, as the 
history of music shows, no art ever became ''absolute'' by 
cultivating an ascetic and a priori neglect of what its 
accessories, verbal, pictorial, or functional, suggest to it. 



VII 

In only one branch of music did Beethoven not show 
himself supreme ; for in his Misa Solemnis and the choral 
finale of the Ninth Symphony he undoubtedly triumphed in 
his rough-rider's attack on the long-neglected problems of 
choral music. But in lyric music, that is to say, in songs 
and small instrumental pieces, his only significant work is 
the beautiful Liederkreis — which, strictly speaking, is lyric 
only in its individual sections, and cannot be taken as less 
than a large whole — and a very few other scattered songs, 
together with some small and extremely interesting but 
unequal collections of pianoforte " Bagatelles." 

Beethoven's Ufetime coincides with much of the greatest 
period of German poetry, and some speculation has been 
wasted on the question why Goethe had to wait for younger 
and later composers before any musician seemed to under- 
stand his poetry, as far as can be judged by their attempts 
to set any but its lightest utterances. Such speculations 
are as idle as Swift's complaint of the inadequacy of 
Homer's dissertation on tea. The things music can under- 




MUSIC 289 

take at any one epoch seldom coincide with the Uterature 
or politics that may reasonably be expected to interest the 
musician. Most of Beethoven's vast extension of the range 
of musical expression has been ascribed to the French 
Revolution. Why did the French Revolution have so little 
effect of that kind on the composers who lived in France ? 
Emotion can no more help music to express a type of 
thought for which it has no technique than torture can 
help a colour-bKnd man to tell red from green. Sometimes 
the technique grows evidently in response to a demand ; 
sometimes a single man of genius seems to be born with it ; 
but there is no ground for relying on his being bom as soon 
as he is wanted. 

Schubert (1797-1828) was born remarkably a propos, and 
his genius for genuinely lyric song is meteoric enough to upset 
any chronology. It is wonderful that a boy of seventeen 
should have composed the classical setting of Goethe's 
Erlkmig, though that obviously effective and cleverly 
rationalistic essay in the modern ballad is just what might 
be expected to inspire a talented boy with something akin 
to it. But this same boy had already at the age of sixteen 
composed the classical setting of the song, " Gretchen am 
Spinnrade," from Faust, and how he had come to find 
perfect expression for that poem no mortal will ever know. 
His setting of it rings true in every detail, and there is 
nothing in any earlier music that could have served him 
as a model. It is hardly necessary to say that the operatic 
aria, whether of Handel's or of Mozart's type, could not 
give much help to the composer of truly lyric poetry ; the 
problems were almost entirely new, and Bach is not more 
remote from Schiitz than the inspired songs of Schubert are 
remote from his own careful imitations of the clever pioneer 
work of Zumsteeg (1760-1802), from which he steadily ad- 
vanced in a long series of essays, illuminated more and more 
frequently with a blaze of genius, until he stands in the record 
of some six hundred songs as the first and greatest classic of 
lyric music. He is more than that ; possibly he could other- 

T 



290 GERMAN CULTURE 

wise not have been as much. He wrote several operas, 
none of which attained a performance; and though they 
contain beautiful things, they prove that he had an actual 
lack of talent for musical drama. Beethoven in Fidelio 
showed inexperience, but Schubert in Fierrabras shows 
positive obstinacy and want of common sense. Yet in the 
sonata forms his genius, though wandering and undiscip- 
lined, shows that his scope was not merely lyric. The 
openings, many passages in the developments, and nearly 
all passages of which the function is to return to the 
opening theme, show that his large instrumental works 
have a sublime impulse as their motive power. The works 
are notoriously too long, and, except in movements of lyric 
form, diffuse and weedy in build ; the sublime passages 
lapse into the picturesque, the picturesque passages be- 
come pretty, and the prettiness may become trivial ; but 
at the weakest moment the tide may turn, and the reverse 
process may almost delude us into the belief, so dear to 
" romanticists," that such art owes to its weakness a charm 
which is denied to mastery. 

The Romantic Movement in music is a favourite topic, 
but it is no such solid fact in music as it is in literature ; 
and the contrast between " classical " and " romantic " 
has given rise to some of the stupidest fictions in musical 
criticism. Schumann (1810-1856) steeped himself in the 
thoughtful and profound humour of Jean Paul Richter and 
E. T. A. Hoffmann, and evolved a new style of pianoforte 
music which, by means of epigrammatic abruptness and 
pertinacious antithesis, proved capable of development on 
a large scale without need for attacking the higher problems 
of composition. His happy marriage inspired him with a 
gift for song second only to Schubert's; and the steady 
growth of his experience as musician and critic led him 
to adapt his avowedly sententious and discursive style to 
a peculiar treatment of the sonata forms both in chamber 
music and in symphonies. His method, which was in 
essence an artificial simplification of the problems, proved 



MUSIC 291 

remarkably successful, and in some cases (as in the D minor 
symphony, with its uninterrupted series of movements with 
themes in common) opened up new possibilities. Later he 
devoted himself to choral and dramatic music, with less 
important results on the whole, his opera Genoveva being a 
forlorn hope, and his Mass and Requiem being quite un- 
known. Yet at least three voluminous works have a really 
distinguished place in music. Paradies und Peri is a huge 
cantata (the words after Thomas Moore) which raises an 
honestly sentimental prettiness to heights of real beauty. 
The overture and incidental music to Byron's Manfred is 
undeniably great, if not greater (as it is certainly deeper) 
than the poem ; and it is a thousand pities that incidental 
music to a play should, at least in England, be totally in- 
accessible to the public even when the play is on the 
repertoire of any theatre. Lastly, those parts of the inci- 
dental music to Faust which were written before Schumann's 
mind failed are the only music on that subject, except 
Wagner's Faust-Ouvertiire, which can honestly claim to be 
ifi.t company for Goethe's poetry. Berlioz's Damnation de 
Faust is undoubtedly a work of genius, but the paper has 
not been made which could record unscorched what Goethe 
would have thought of the silly devil-worship and school- 
boy cynicism of Berlioz's degradation of his drama. With 
Gounod's Faust we reach the sphere of eminently successful 
opera, and can feel magnanimous enough in recognising its 
many civic and domestic virtues without dragging Goethe 
down from Olympus to the boulevards. Beethoven in- 
i tended some day to write music for Faust, as he had already 
done for Egmont, He died before he had even begun to 
sketch his project, but, thanks to Schumann, a true music 
I for Faust exists, and is as German as the poem. 

There is no opposition between classical music and 
Schumann's romanticism. If his literary interests led him 
to evolve special art-forms for his peculiar ideas, that is 
precisely what every great classical composer did, whether 
their special interests were literary or not. If his applica- 



292 GERMAN CULTURE 

tion of his style to larger and older forms imposed an arti- 
ficial restraint on them and sometimes warped them to 
uncouth shapes, there is nothing romantic or free in that, 
If some of his most characteristic pianoforte music seems 
most formless where it is most successful, then we have a 
true classic in a new form, with a classical perfection oi 
union between form and matter. To complain of the pro- 
lixity of the Humoreske, or even of that much more respon- 
sible manifesto the Fantasia, Op. 17, is like complaining o: 
the digressions and delays in Tristram Shandy. In literature 
it is possible to insist on a narrower definition of " classical '* 
than that criterion of organic unity that I have assumed 
here. In music it is not possible ; the art is too young. 
To-day the rising generation may still remember to have 
spoken with people who were married before Beethoven 
died. It is not merely in our own day that the turmoil o: 
music is too near to us to let us distinguish the really vita 
issues from the trivial. The whole history of music from 
the time of Bach to that of Richard Strauss is the history 
of one age which only a too close proximity impels us to 
divide into three or four with mutually incompatible ideals. 
The kind of classicism against which the romantic musicians 
can be ranged as in opposition was one of the most radically 
and subtly un-classical things in art. Its real representa- 
tive was Spohr (1784-1859), who, in spite of a cloying^ 
mannerism, had a really splendid fund of melodic invention, 
by means of which he could make one unvar5H[ng set o: 
formal habits serve the purpose of a number of work 
in a surprising variety of forms, some of them external! 
new, and all of them effective. In France and Italy this 
kind of mastery has always been firmly believed to partake 
of the essence of classical music ; all higher mastery is^ 
either identified with it, or ignored, or else treated ai 
anarchic. Fortunately the German musical temperament, 
though devoted to logic, does not so eagerly demand tha* 
the logic shall assert itself whether the facts are ready foi 
it or not ; and Spohr himself could show more breadth of 






MUSIC 293 

mind in his actions than in his music. It is remarkable that 
he should have been the first not only to praise, but to 
produce Wagner's Der Fliegende Hollander. 

Spohr's domination over European music was formid- 
able, but it was surpassed by the far more genial influence 
of Mendelssohn (1809-1847). To call Mendelssohn a 
pseudo-classic is hard, but there is no doubt that pseudo- 
classicism was the result of his work in every corner where 
it penetrated. One brilliant critic has compared him with 
Jane Austen, and certainly the overture to Antigone is 
remarkably like the tears and tremors of Miss Marianne 
Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, But when did Jane 
Austen show the slightest sign of mistaking Marianne 
Dashwood for Antigone ? There is something wrong with 
Mendelssohn's art (except in its far from negligible great 
moments), and the wrong has little or nothing to do with 
the range of his style, whether in successes like the Hebrides 
Overture and the good things in Elijah, or in failures like 
the Reformation Symphony, It is characteristic of more 
than one art and trend of thought in his time, and it con- 
sists mainly in a misplacing of the sense of duty. In hfe 
and conduct the sense of duty makes us rise above our- 
selves with an effort ; otherwise the doing of our duty is 
indistinguishable from habit or even pleasure. But the 
one supreme duty of a work of art is to be itself ; and the 
moment a sense of duty enters and tries to lift it higher, 
the effect is insincere. Great injustice may be done if 
we impute the insincerity to the artist ; all the evidence 
goes to show, for example, that Mendelssohn was one of 
the sincerest men that ever lived — no artist ever came 
under his personal influence without being the better for 
it, and Schumann adored him. 

It is quite arguable that Mendelssohn's sudden and 
early death was one of the greatest calamities in musical 
history, and that it deprived us of the real revelation of a 
musical genius whom we positively know to have been as 
gifted as Mozart, but who had so far never come to grips 



294 GERMAN CULTURE ■il 

with the real problems of his art. Certainly if Jlandel's 
career had been cut short at the same time of hfe as 
Mendelssohn's, we should at this day know nothing of him 
but that he was an infant prodigy, became immensely 
fashionable, and showed, to any who should have the 
curiosity to dig out his works, an ease and mastery which 
he might have exercised to great purpose if he had chosen. 

Whether the death of Mendelssohn was a calamity or 
a safeguard from sadder disillusion, there is something 
painful in the reaction against his influence. As the sense 
of duty in Mendelssohnianism was inartistic, so was the 
self-conscious freedom in musical Byronism. Moral indig- 
nation about purely artistic matters absorbed criticism in 
personalities and tragically severed the greatest representa- 
tives of the deepest German musical culture from those not 
less ardent souls whose ideas were less abstract. Yet all 
were agreed in working in a " romantic " spirit ; there was 
in the lifetime of Schumann little opposition either to 
descriptive music or to new art-forms as such. But there 
was grave doubt as to the sincerity of the chief pioneers ; 
and no candid historian can to-day blame the doubters, 
though he may deplore that one injustice produced another. 

If only the art and style of Liszt (1811-1886) had been 
more independent of limeHght, personal magnetism, and 
pose ; if only the early works of Wagner (1813-1883), up to 
and including Lohengnn (1847), had not shown vulgarity in 
their most successful features far more positively than they 
showed a general tendency towards his ideals ; how much 
simpler the history of mid-nineteenth-century music would 
have been ! As it fell out, we can afford at this time of day 
to realise on the one hand that the purification of Wagner's 
art when he began upon Der Ring des Nibelungen was one 
of the most astounding events in musical history ; and, on 
the other hand, that, once it was accomplished and accepted, 
there was grave intellectual dishonesty or aesthetic blind- 
ness in the altitude of Wagnerians who insisted on treating 
things like the end of the overture to Tannhduser and the 



MUSIC 295 

introduction to the third act of Lohengrin as if a composer 
of high ideals had any excuse for writing them. As 
a composer, Wagner was two people, and only the firm 
coherence of his development as his own librettist holds 
the two together. They differ not as Haydn differs from 
Beethoven, not as early Beethoven differs from late, but 
as Gounod differs from Goethe. Rienzi has the sincerity 
of a young barbarian who knows no better than to break 
all records in the piling-up of stirring dramatic effects. It 
was an immense success. Der Fliegende Hollander hardly 
seems to be by the same composer, so entirely new is its 
power and so bold its continuity of dramatic movement. 
It is incomparably the most sincere of his earlier works ; 
and though the poem of Tannhdtiser shows an advance in 
real scope, its music shows a more ambiguous advance in 
mere ambition. It is strange to see how it alternately 
repelled and attracted Schumann, who had been moved to 
real moral indignation by the best and most nearly sincere 
of all Meyerbeer's works. Lohengrin begins and ends with 
ethereal beauty ; the poem is excellent stagecraft and, no 
less than in Wagner's earlier works, far beyond any classical 
or contemporary libretto as literature. But most of the 
music seems to have settled down to a safe and uniform 
ambling movement which, while not noticeably breaking 
down, gives but a negative solution of the great musical 
problem which underlies all Wagner's work from its first 
inspired enunciation in Der Fliegende Hollander to its perfect 
solution in various parts of the tetralogy of Der Ring des 
Nibelungen, in Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von 
Niirnberg, and Parsifal. 

The reader will not find this problem difficult to formu- 
late after what has been said of Gluck and of the time- 
scale on which the sonata style moves. We have seen 
that in the musical language of Beethoven a complete 
design, with a complete series of dramatic contrasts, can 
be made to run its course within ten minutes, and we may 
add that it can seldom be sustained for more than fifteen 



296 GERMAN CULTURE 

without breaking down. Obviously, then, such music can 
be fitted to the far slower progress of a stage drama only 
by a series of conventions which give the music a clear 
right to stop and begin again whenever it has need of a 
pause. Wagner's ultimate musical question comes to this : 
Can music be induced to cover the wider time-scale of drama 
pari passu? If it can, then its sequences and climaxes 
will be as far beyond the scope of Beethoven's art as 
Beethoven's are beyond the scope of Bach's. Wagnerian 
Leit-motif (the system by which musical phrases become 
associated with the innermost and outermost threads of 
the dramatic thought) is but the most obvious of the many 
means by which Wagner grappled with this task. The 
orthodox account of Wagner's task is wrapped in a glorious 
veil generally known as das Allkunstwerk, or union of all the 
arts in one focus. This conception, though it seems far 
more stupendous than the humble musical proportion-sum 
given above, resolves itself into the obvious facts that 
Wagner was his own librettist, that he insisted on looking 
after every detail and every accessory in the staging and 
acting of his works, and that in the Bayreuth theatre we 
see the astonishing amount of organisation and of practical 
and scenic resource that he actually invented. But for all 
this, for all his importance to German literature as a poet, 
to German sociology as an agitator, and to German philo- 
sophy as a disciple of Schopenhauer and a stimulus and 
irritant to Nietzsche, he is and remains infinitely greater 
as a musician than as any other kind of artist or thinker. 
And he solved his musical problem. The effects upon 
musical history were curious, for the risks that he took had 
not been heard of since the end of the seventeenth century, 
and musicians either declared them insanely illegitimate or 
else sided with Wagner by denying the risks in full view of 
accomplished disasters. 

The risk that Wagner took was that of an obvious 
breakdown in the course of his immense new sequences and 
climaxes. In other words, patchiness is a danger which 



MUSIC 297 

besets every attempt to establish a new scale of dimensions 
in an art. Purcell (1658-1695) and Buxtehude (1637 -1707) 
were always patchy unless they could use a basso ostinato 
to keep their music spinning by repeating itself over and 
over again as a cumulative effect. With the advent of 
Bach, patchiness became an inadmissible fault, not merely 
in the music of great masters, but in any music that was 
presentable in public at all. The unevenness of Schubert's 
larger instrumental works is not patchiness. Unless we view 
the music from such a distance of memory that its actual 
length ceases to affect our impression, we can accuse Schubert 
only of too easy and monotonous a flow. Again, Schumann's 
evasion of the higher problems of composition was managed, 
as it were, by a charming gesture of acknowledgment that 
such problems existed. Classicists like Spohr had an in- 
fallible recipe for each problem ; Mendelssohn had a 
Handelian instinct which sometimes worked miracles and 
never led him into difficulties : showmen like Meyerbeer 
could get out of a tight place by firing off a cadenza or by 
covering their retreat with a military band behind the 
scene. But Wagner had the sublime impudence to let his 
music attempt the obviously impossible, break down if it 
must, and go on again as if nothing had happened. One 
result was that it is only quite recently that even Wagnerians 
have sufficiently realised that he does not always break 
down, that the break-down is no essential feature of his 
art, and hence that the obviously impossible effort in one 
act of an opera may turn out to be a case of solvitur ambu- 
lando in the next. In his very first effort at the true 
solution of his problems, he accomplishes a scene fully half 
an hour long, or twice the length of the longest single 
design in classical music. I refer to the opening of Das 
Rheingold, where the music is perfect in its coherence and 
swing until the beginning of the second scene, where Fricka 
awakens Wotan and makes the music talk business with 
infinite embarrassment, though there are signs that it would 
recover its self-control the moment Fricka and the giants 



298 GERMAN CULTURE 

gave it a chance. Again, the first and third acts of Die 
Walkure show no lapses of composition, though one fills 
an hour, and the other an hour and twenty minutes. I do 
not say that this is not too long, but simply that it does 
not break down, as, for instance, some passages in Wotan's 
monologues in the second act do break down even before 
they threaten to be lengthy at all. 

It is sad that the patches in Wagner's greatest works 
should have so far made more mark on recent music than 
the wonderful fact that his music often accomplishes its 
aim of spanning, like the rainbow of Walhalla, spaces vast 
enough to include the whole complexity of a dozen classical 
movements under one arc. Gluck's reform of opera in- 
volved infinitely less sustaining power, but it ran parallel 
with the mighty development of the sonata style. The 
Symphonic Poems of Liszt may be taken as pioneer work 
in an instrumental style that shall run a similar parallel 
course with Wagnerian art, but the fruition is not yet 
there, for Liszt's powers of composition were inchoate and 
improvisatorial. Anton Bruckner's nine enormous sym- 
phonies claim the privilege of importing Wagner's slowest 
climaxes into the concert-room without any responsibility 
whatever for their antecedents or consequents ; while the 
immense energy and dimensions of Richard Strauss's 
musical movement prove indeed that he is the most master- 
ful genius of the present day, but throughout his career 
have hardly been applied with that unworldly foolishness 
which at last convinces an uneasy world that it is in the 
presence of an immortal. 

Meanwhile the classical tradition, and something more 
than tradition, whether classical or romantic, was through- 
out the latter half of the nineteenth century unfalteringly 
nourished and revived by two great musicians, a composer 
of instrumental music and songs, Brahms (1833-1892), and 
a violinist, Joachim (1831-1907). Among players there 
were others, especially Clara Schumann (1819-1896) whose 
own greatness is added to her husband's name ; but among 



MUSIC 299 

composers Brahms must stand alone by the side of Wagner, 
not as Haydn stands by the side of Gluck, but as Sebastian 
Bach might so have stood but for a discrepancy of date. Of 
course, to say this is at once to label Brahms a reactionary ; 
but the history of the fine arts soon obliterates the distinction 
between reactionaries and Vorwdrtsmdnner. Sebastian Bach 
himself was a hardened and cheerful reactionary long before 
Gluck was a better musician than Handel's cook; but it 
is his most progressive son who is old-fashioned now. 
Brahms lived long enough to become fashionable in Eng- 
land for some ten years before his death ; some reasons for 
the fashion were unintelligent, and the same reasons make 
him rather out of fashion now. This does not alter the fact 
that his four symphonies, his four concertos, his other 
orchestral works, his chamber music, his Deutsches Requiem, 
and other choral works are unapproached by anything in 
their kind since Beethoven; and no musician with any 
pretensions to a wide range of sympathy with the classics 
doubts that Brahms belongs to them as no imitator, but as 
a maestro di color che sanno. He is no less perfect an artist 
in his songs ; but time is needed before the musical world 
can yet agree to do these justice. The special problems of 
Wagnerian declamation were stated, by Wagner no less 
than by his disciples, with a one-sidedness that has blinded 
musical orthodoxy to the nature of lyric as distinguished 
from dramatic poetry. Hugo Wolf (1860-1903), a song- 
writer of great genius, applied Wagner's principles to songs 
with a determination as fierce and instinctive as his pecuhar 
musical inspiration ; little justice was done him during his 
short and ailing life ; and Brahms' s wider and more com- 
plete view of lyric singing is at present supposed to be too 
narrow to be compatible with justice to Wolf. This is but 
one more of the thousand matters in which journalism has 
shrouded music in fumes of literature. 

As long as records remain, no English accounts of 
German musical culture can omit to acknowledge the incal- 
culable debt England owes to the memory of Joachim for 



300 GERMAN CULTURE 

the sixty years in which he paid regular annual visits to 
England, familiarising us with the noblest and purest 
interpretations that have ever been heard of the classics 
of music. His was no virtuoso's repertoire, but the whole 
history of instrumental music ; and his mind was the mind 
of a great composer. It is not surprising that the one 
nation which has produced the main bulk of classical music 
should also produce the greatest interpreters thereof. 
German players, singers, and conductors owe their eminence 
to the same qualities history has shown in German com- 
posers. It is idle to inquire whether their native talent is 
equal to that of other races ; the most wonderful native 
talent in the world would be but a part of the force of char- 
acter which the best type of German musician has always 
instinctively devoted to the highest purpose of his art. 



I 



VII 

THE STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 
OF GERMAN EDUCATION 

By MICHAEL E. SADLER 

Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds 



German education has long been in many respects an 
example to Great Britain. Seen in the light of the war, it 
is also a warning. 

It is exacting in its intellectual standards, methodical in 
purpose, massive in operation. Its strength has lain in 
ideas, translated by it into action. But its excellence has 
become one-sided. Its elaborate organisation, triumphantly 
enforced by the State, has weakened its moral independ- 
ence. At this great crisis in the history of the world, we 
feel that its responsible leaders have shown themselves 
distorted in vision and lacking in right judgment. In- 
spiring in its origin, illustrious in its history, rich in examples 
of disinterested service to truth, German education has 
paid the penalty for going to excess in the use of methods 
which, if employed in moderation, are salutary and wise. 
Its long tradition of mental discipline has exposed it to 
influences which have preyed upon fairness of mind and 
have perverted intellectual passion into partisanship. Its 
conception of the claims of the State has led it to neglect 
the duty of disinterested reflexion by means of which, in 
the past, German scholars have done signal service to the 
cause of truth and to the scientific progress of the world. 
Having overcome, perhaps too completely, certain weak- 
nesses which attend individual effort in the domain of 
national education, German statesmen and administrators 

301 



802 GERMAN CULTURE 

have failed to guard their country against the even greater 
danger which arises when the educational system of a 
people is for the time possessed by the spirit of aggressive 
ambition, a spirit which, under the guise of patriotism, is 
but individual self-will writ large. 

It is not too much to say that the tone of thought and 
feeling which, during recent years, has prevailed in German 
education from the elementary schools to the universities 
is one cause of the apparent unanimity of the German 
people in support of the policy of their Government and of 
their unstinted sacrifice of life and wealth in the present 
war. National education, organised as it has been in Ger- 
many, is an engine of stupendous power for stimulating 
national emotion and for concentrating it upon duties im- 
posed by the State. German teachers, in spite of a great 
tradition of intellectual freedom, are administratively 
subordinate to the Government. By subtle influences, this 
subordination has encouraged among many leaders of 
German thought a temper of mind which, in the excitement 
of desperate struggle, has become passionate, unreasonable, 
and provocative. In German schools certain methods of 
instruction have been deliberately and skilfully pursued. 
These methods have secured a high average of industry 
and attainment. But these advantages have been won by 
an excessive attention to the purely intellectual side of 
school training. It is clear that the over-developed intel- 
lectualism of the German schools has failed to secure inde- 
pendence of observation among the pupils, or to deepen 
insight into the working of the minds of non-German peoples, 
or to cultivate tolerance towards uncongenial opinions, or 
to train the power of quickly adjusting the mind to facts 
previously disregarded or misunderstood. German educa- 
tion, through the excessive employment of certain methods 
of instruction which are excellent when balanced by other 
influences, has evidently produced intellectual impression- 
ableness rather than independence of mind. 

German education has thus been one cause of the 



m 



EDUCATION 303 

strength of the war-feeling because it has provided many 
channels for the diffusion of the ideas of the militarist 
party. Those ideas have presented themselves to many, 
especially among the older teachers, under the guise of a 
duty imposed by the need for national self-preservation. 
To others they have been attractive because of their appeal 
to national ambition and because of their defiant assertion 
of German power. There have been for some little time 
two currents of feeling among the educated classes in 
Germany. The one is due to a strong conviction that the 
treasures of German culture must be guarded against attack 
from nations which are regarded by German thinkers as 
comparatively barbarous. The other is due to a rising 
aggressiveness, especially among younger men, and to a 
belief that the historic mission of Germany is to educate 
the world after asserting its irresistible power in the destinies 
of Europe. This newer spirit is in some of its manifesta- 
tions impatient with the customary discipline of the German 
schools. It is restive under its routine, contemptuous of 
its older ideals, intolerant of its scale of values. Military 
ambitions have appealed to it because courage has been its 
chief test of virtue. It believes in valour as the touchstone 
of character. There is thus a great cleavage in ethical 
outlook between the young Germany and the old. But the 
disciplined organisation in which the older intellectual 
Germany has been entrenched lends itself to the too ready 
acceptance of these new ideas when they are supported by 
those in high authority in the State. The result is that 
there has been much less critical resistance to these new 
doctrines in Germany than in the freer but less highly- 
organised educational systems of other countries. German 
education has too few safety valves. And at the present 
time militarism is dominant, partly because of the docility 
of those disciplined by the old educational routine, partly 
because of the passion for self-development and national 
self-assertion which is noticeable among many of the 
younger men. 



804 GERMAN CULTURE 

There is good as well as evil in this new temper of 
individualism in Germany. It hates shams and hypocrisies. 
It is willing to try bold experiments. It does not spare 
itself in its challenge of conventions. But it is exaggerated, 
unbalanced, extreme. It shows itself, in more sensual 
temperaments, in self-indulgence and vice ; among those 
who have a marked gift for organisation, in venturesomeness 
which often leaps into speculation ; and in some of the 
noblest natures, in a high-strung desperate courage. The 
sensibility of the German temperament has, of late, dis- 
closed itself in this emotion of power. But German educa- 
tion, over-intellectualised in its outlook, and preoccupied 
with instruction, has not given healthy opportunities for 
the vent of this emotion or provided quiet personal checks 
upon its extravagance. This is the point at which, in spite 
of its admirable qualities, the system of German education 
has failed in recent years to meet the most urgent needs of 
the younger generation. It has been inelastic, and has not 
adjusted itself to the moral and emotional problems which 
had, for the time, become more pressing than the 
intellectual. 



II 

The established system of German education is distin- 
guished by its extraordinary precision of aim, by its high 
standards of intellectual attainment, by its liberal encour- 
agement of organised scientific research, and by its wide 
diffusion and convenience of access. In order to under- 
stand its present condition, we must look at it in the per- 
spective of history. Its strength lies deeply rooted in the 
eighteenth century, but what are now its most conspicuous 
features have been the creation of the nineteenth. From 
1806 to about 1840, German education passed through an 
era of reconstruction, which was inspired by patriotic en- 
thusiasm and by a firm belief in the political value of 
intellectual achievement. From 1840 to 1870, it went 



EDUCATION 305 

through an era of consolidation, marked by some reaction 
from the high-pitched hopes of the eariier period, and also 
by the growth of realism in educational policy. From 1870 
to the present day, its development has been one of the 
intellectual wonders of the world, a great piece of admin- 
istrative engineering, deliberately planned, adequately 
financed, untiringly carried forward to its aim. 

The study of German education is made at once more 
complicated and more interesting by the diverse conditions 
which prevail in different states of the Empire. Each of 
the greater German states has made its independent con- 
tribution to the educational thought and practice of the 
whole community. Thus education in Northern Germany 
has been influenced by that of Saxony, of Bavaria, of 
Wiirtemberg, and of Baden. These, in their turn, have 
been affected by the policy and organising power of Prussia. 
Nor has the independent action of some of the smaller 
states like S axe-Weimar, and of free cities like Hamburg 
and Bremen, been an insignificant factor in the develop- 
ment of German education. This diversity in unity is 
characteristic of German social policy, and is especially 
noticeable in the domain of educational practice. Thus, to 
speak of the educational system of Germany is, in the strict 
sense of the words, inaccurate. There is no single code for 
the regulation of elementary schools throughout the Empire. 
Attendance at continuation schools is subject to an imperial 
law of permissive application, or to state laws which differ 
widely in the various states. The courses of study in the 
higher schools for girls and (to a less marked degree) the 
curricula of higher schools for boys, show considerable 
variety in different parts of Germany. There is no mechani- 
cal uniformity in any grade of German education. No 
central education department in Berlin controls the whole 
system of German schools. But the German system, while 
able to adapt itself to local conditions, maintains an im- 
pressive uniformity of standards. It is so organised as to 
secure interchange of educational opportunity and the 

u 



306 GERMAN CULTURE 

reciprocal recognition of educational qualifications. Under- 
lying the whole of it are certain intellectual presuppositions 
which characterise it among the educational systems of the 
world. It exerts a united influence upon the thought of 
other nations. The local varieties which distinguish it do 
not weaken or obscure the fundamental unity of the whole 
system. 

In certain respects, the educational achievement of 
Germany has been unequalled in the world. Nowhere else 
have systematic research and (though with perhaps too 
much speciaUsation) scientific method been more diligently 
applied to educational problems. Nowhere else, except in 
certain parts of Switzerland, has the tradition of obligatory 
attendance at school so deeply penetrated the national life. 
Nowhere else is public and parental opinion so strongly in 
favour of education. Nowhere else has compulsory school- 
ing been pushed so far into the years of adolescence. The 
German Government and the leaders of German civic 
opinion are convinced of the importance of expending State 
and municipal funds upon the culture of the people, with 
far-seeing munificence combined with careful economy in 
administration. In Germany, technological education of 
all grades is effectively organised in the urban districts, 
both for the employing class and for workmen. Applied 
science is skilfully used in public administration. The 
teaching profession is organised as a branch of the civil 
service, a plan which has grave defects as well as great 
advantages. For fully-established teachers in the State 
schools there is a good system of pensions, as well as liberal 
provision for sick leave and for the maintenance of the 
teacher's widow and orphans in their bereavement. 
Secondary education, especially for boys, is widely diffused, 
at low fees and with high intellectual standards, though 
the attendance at these schools has been greatly increased 
by the desire to obtain certain privileges in military status, 
and not solely by a zeal for education for its own sake. 

Every grade of British education from the kindergarten 



EDUCATION 307 

to the university has been influenced by German example 
and by German investigation. Froebel's writings, and the 
work of FroebeFs disciples, brought a new spirit into the 
methods of training little children in infant schools and in 
nursery classes. Our courses of professional training for 
teachers are indebted to the writings of Herbart, Wiese, 
Schmidt, Wilhelm Rein, Wilhelm Miinch, Natorp, and of 
many German writers on psychology. Our school hygiene 
and the medical inspection of school children are under 
obligation to the stimulus of German example. The recent 
advances in continuation schools have been helped by the 
successful experience of Dr. Kerschensteiner of Munich. 
The more effective organisation of courses of study in 
State-aided secondary schools is in part traceable to British 
study of German experience. The encouragement of higher 
technological education of university rank is, to a great 
degree, the direct result of German example. But the 
crucial difference between the history of German education 
and that of English during the nineteenth century (the 
remark is less true of the Scottish) lies in the different use 
which the two countries have made of the power of the State. 
In Germany that power has been exerted unflinchingly and 
without any serious resistance from public opinion. In 
England the pawer of the State has been used reluctantly 
and has met with opposition at every stage. Without 
serious misgiving, Germany adopted the principle that the 
control of national education is a function of the central 
state. England (and, in a measure, Scotland) hesitated 
between two opposing theories, namely, the theory of State 
control and the theory of group autonomy under the general 
supervision of the State. Germany came to a decisive con- 
clusion on this fundamental question of procedure. Great 
Britain (and particularly England) remained divided in 
conviction about it and therefore irresolute in policy. 
Germany standardised her education upon a system. 
Britain, distrustful of State control, compromised. Hence, 
Britain was dilatory while Germany was prompt. Britain 



808 GERMAN CULTURE 

temporised, because she was feeling her way by instinct to 
some new adjustment of the claims of the State and of the 
various social groups of which the State consists. Germany 
cast in her lot with a consistent theory and acted vigorously 
in accordance with it. 

But the failure of England (and, in a less degree, of 
Scotland) to work out a consistent plan of State control in 
education is part of the price, perhaps the chief part of the 
price, paid by her for an administrative freedom which, in 
other fields of effort, has enabled her to render unrivalled 
service to social progress and to the economic development 
of the world. The struggle of educational ideals in England 
during the nineteenth century was but one symptom of a 
social struggle between almost equal forces in the national 
life. In the course of that long contest, in which Scotsmen 
resident in England bore their part, nearly all of the social 
groups which constitute our nation formed the habit of self- 
reliance and acquired experience of independent action. 
They learned to refrain from political interference with the 
self-governing British communities in the Dominions beyond 
the seas. They learned the lesson of religious toleration. 
They granted freedom of self-organisation to artisans. 
They accustomed themselves to hearing both sides of the 
argument on all the great questions of public policy and of 
national organisation. They passed through revolutionary 
crises without civil w^ar. They combined new ideas and 
old traditions with a fertility of resource and with a degree 
of mutual consideration unmatched elsewhere. 



Ill 

During the last few months, the sinister side of State 
control in German education has been revealed to the world, 
and not least to thoughtful observers in the United States. 
President Murray Butler of Columbia University, who has 
been active in establishing intimate relations between the 
German and American universities, has recently ^hown his 



EDUCATION 809 

disillusionment with some of the results of German educa- 
tion, and his deepened appreciation of the British view that 
the supreme outcome of educational training is right judg- 
ment, combined with disinterested uprightness of character. 

A still more penetrating analysis of the failure of German 
education to hold the mind steady against chauvinism and 
against over- weening national ambitions has been made by 
M. de Lapredelle, Professor of the University of Paris and 
General Secretary of the French Society of International 
Law. In an article published in America in November, 
M. de Lapredelle said that since 1870 Germany has been 
led into an excessive assumption of intellectual supremacy. 
Modern Germans, in his judgment, are very dihgent ob- 
servers and careful students ; attach vast importance to 
detail ; love to catalogue, and catalogue almost with genius. 
But the near-sightedness w^hich arises from intense study 
of a small part of a subject is apt to produce in them an 
aggravated narrowness of vision. Narrow vision in turn 
may eventuate in selfishness. The Germans have become 
selfish after this fashion. Germany's political philosophy 
forms the basis of her educational system, and therefore 
the basis of her social system. It cannot be denied, M. de 
Lapredelle writes, that German education, as well as her 
politics and militarism, directly pointed to this great con- 
flict. The glorification of the State has included of neces- 
sity the sacrifice of the individual, and this has been 
conducted ruthlessly in Germany. 

An even better-equipped observer, Mr. George Saunders, 
for many years the correspondent at Berlin, first of the 
Morning Post and afterwards of The Times, summed up, 
in 1 90 1, his experience of the contrast between the German 
and the English mind as follows : " I find that the intel- 
lectual apprehension of the average educated German is at 
least, on a rough computation, ten times quicker than that 
of the average educated Englishman. On the other hand, 
in nine cases out of ten, I find the German's intellectual 
judgment most uncertain and weak, and often most con- 



310 GERMAN CULTURE 

ventional. In ordinary matters of judgment, it usually 
turns out that the Englishman has, perhaps unconsciously, 
been taking a much wider basis for his induction than the 
German has. The German is so persistently taught the 
value of specialisation that he adopts a spurious kind of it 
in his ordinary judgments, and limits his field of vision 
quite unnecessarily. He is taught at school to form judg- 
ments on the strength of the facts submitted to him, and 
not to distrust their adequacy. Hence, gifted Germans with 
international experience often contrast the hesitancy and 
care with which an educated Englishman expresses his view 
on any subject with the eagerness and rashness manifested 
by the majority of educated Germans in talking about it.'' 

A similar view was expressed by the great biologist, 
Dr. Virchow, at the great conference on higher education 
which was held, at the instance of the Prussian Government, 
in Berlin in December, 1890. "I regret,'' he said, "that 
I cannot bear my testimony to our having made any pro- 
gress in forming the character of the pupils in our schools. 
When I look back over the forty years during which I have 
been professor and examiner, a period during which I have 
been brought in contact not only with physicians and 
scientific investigators, but also with many other types of 
men, I cannot say that I have the impression that w^e have 
made material advance in training up men with strength 
of character. On the contrary, 1 feel that we are on a 
downward path. The number of ' characters ' becomes 
smaller, and this is connected with the shrinkage in private 
and individual work done during the lad's school life. For 
it is only by means of independent work that the pupil 
learns to hold his own against external difficulties and to 
find in his own strength, in his own nature, in his own 
being, the means of resisting such difficulties and prevailing 
over them." 

Another careful observer. Professor Wetekamp,^ laments 

^ In bis work Selbstbetdtigung und Schaffensfreude in Erziehung und Un^ 
terricht (Teubner, Leipzig, 1910). 



I 



EDUCATION 311 

the failure of the modern German school to train its pupils 
by self-activity to independent work. German higher 
education, he contends, concentrates itself too exclusively 
on the intellectual side. By its methods of instruction it 
over-develops the receptivity of the pupiFs mind and does 
not train the power of original production. Its intellectual 
standard, as fixed by the leaving examinations, is so high 
that in order to attain it the pupil is helped too much by 
skilful teaching and hurried too much in his private studies. 

Before the war, there were many signs of uneasiness 
among thoughtful Germans at some results of their educa- 
tional system. They felt that the German higher schools 
were excessive in their intellectual demands and paid too 
little attention to self-direction and independence among 
the pupils. It is significant that the confidential " Memor- 
andum on the German Foreign School System,'' which was 
issued to the Budget Commission of the Reichstag in 1914, 
and analysed by Sir Edward Cook in the Morning Post of 
November 4 last, states that "Germans resident in England 
value English education so highly that they nearly all send 
their children to English schools.'' 

In Germany, the masses of the people have had little 
to do with determining the course of educational policy. 
The keys of the position are in the hands of a strong central 
authority, which works through a highly expert Civil 
Service, including the teachers in its ranks. In spite of 
the fact that there is no Imperial Minister of Education in 
Berlin, German secondary and university education are 
nevertheless a coherent whole and are influenced by similar 
presuppositions. The most competent German observers 
have long admitted that, though the British (and especially 
the English) system of instruction is far behind the German, 
the German system of training is far behind the Enghsh in 
its effects on character. The tendency of the German 
system is to produce a very large number of boys possessing 
a high level of attainment in a wide range of subjects, to 
ground them excellently, and to leave them highly dis- 



312 GERMAN CULTURE 

ciplined and quick to learn, especially when under instruc- 
tion. On the other hand, the tendency of the British system 
is to give more scope to individual talent and, at the cost 
of much intellectual wastage, to produce a comparatively 
small number of first-rate minds keenly interested in their 
favourite subjects, accustomed to rely a great deal on 
themselves, and keen to pursue their studies to a higher 
point. 

The German system of education is collectivist in its 
tendency. It has the strength and merits of collectivism. 
Its forces can be easily mobilised. Its different parts are 
standardised to a convenient pattern. It lends itself to 
effective co-operation in large developments of industry 
and commerce, as well as to concerted labour in research. 
It is prodigiously strong as an engine for conserving the 
intellectual capacity of the nation and for directing it to 
an appointed end. Its organisation, which has permitted 
its rapid and economical development, has made the educa- 
tional system of Germany a weapon in the hands of the 
dominant power in the State. It has made the minds of 
individuals too susceptible to current intellectual fashions 
and has left them deficient in the power of independent 
criticism and of resistance to governmental control. 

During the years immediately preceding the war, many 
German and British teachers were feeling their way to 
educational reforms in their respective countries which 
would, to some extent, have corrected the defects of each 
system by engrafting upon it many of the excellent qualities 
of the other. There is no doubt that German education 
and British have each much to gain from a study of the 
other's merits and from avoidance of the other's defects. 
But the two systems are deeply rooted in national history. 
It is doubtful whether the finest qualities of the one can be 
combined with the finest qualities of the other. It may be 
predicted, however, that, as a result of the war, the char- 
acter-forming influences in British education will be imi- 
tated in Germany, and that, on the other hand, German 



P EDUCATION 813 

zeal in encouraging research and technological training will 
jceive closer attention from the British Government. 



r 



IV 



From our experience of German education we may draw 
lessons for the guidance of educational policy in Great 
Britain. If we are prudent, we shall avoid an excess of 
bureaucratic control. We shall frankly recognise the value 
of official experience and of the guidance and prestige 
which the resources of Government enable it to give to 
educational effort. But we shall avoid that system of 
administrative law which withdraws the official from the 
ordinary courts and places him under a special code. This 
arrangement is convenient for administrative discipline and 
on other grounds, but is injurious because it segregates the 
official world from the non-official population. We shall 
also guard ourselves against setting too much store by 
administrative tidiness in our educational system. We 
shall remind ourselves that, in the difficult days of social 
readjustment which will follow the war, there will be more 
need than ever for variety of experiment, for variety of 
educational tradition, for variety of responsible initiative. 
The most valuable things in our British education depend 
on encouragement being given to each school to have a 
personality of its own. But to have a personality, a school 
must have (so far as a reasonable degree of public order 
allows) freedom of growth and self-direction in its purpose. 
For this freedom a price has to be paid. The price is a 
certain untidiness in organisation, an overlapping of effort, 
and much waste of intellectual energy. This is a heavy 
price to pay, but it is worth paying. Freedom from the 
iron band of State control allows teachers and pupils the 
training in individual responsibility which develops and 
fortifies character. And the highest kind of freedom, though 
indocile to external pressure, realises itself in willing subordi- 
nation to the common good. 



314 GERMAN CULTURE 



I 



In the future development of our educational policy i^ 
will be prudent to respect local opinion, even when it is 
stubborn ; to elicit and to respect the convictions of parents ; 
and, above all, to respect the individual conscience. Edu- 
cation touches problems on which conscience is sensitive. 
And national education is noblest when it is inspired by 
a variety of earnest social ideals and kindled by a desire 
for justice and for honourable dealing between man and man 
and between nation and nation. But the healthy growth of 
this spirit in education involves opportunity for variety of 
judgment upon some of the most controversial questions. 
It presupposes, also, a reasonable degree of freedom of 
utterance on the part of the teachers. This is very difficult 
to combine with State control. But just as education can- 
not dispense with a due measure of aid and superintendence 
from the State, so also the State cannot in the long run 
dispense with the moral independence of character formed 
among its citizens by the influences of a morally free edu- 
cation. Some of the advantages of administrative economy 
and precision may therefore be wisely foregone by the State 
in order to secure the greater benefit of a general readiness 
to bear moral responsibility in judgment and in action. 
The most indispensable service which education can render 
to a people is secured not by administrative machinery but 
by spiritual influence. This influence is quickened in 
the conscience, is shed by personal example, is fostered by 
great traditions, and is deepened by wise instruction, by 
self-training, and by the experience of later life. It is 
an influence which keeps the heart and the mind (not the 
mind only, but the heart also) in knowledge, and not in 
knowledge only but in love. 



VIII 

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC ASPECTS 
OF GERMAN NATIONALISM 

By D. H. MACGREGOR, M.A. 

Professor of Political Economy in the University of Leeds 



The war has turned our attention to the methods and 
purposes of an ideal which is broadly defined as nation- 
alism. It might seem that, so far as Germany is concerned, 
we in England need consider only the manifestation of this 
spirit in the outward activity of that country, its Weltpolitik. 
We have, in fact, become interested in more than that — 
in the idea of the German State at home, as this is affected 
by the same policy of nationalism. We have even claimed 
that the result of the war must be, not only to defeat the 
militarism of Prussia as a weapon of world-power, but also 
to free the German people from the dominance they are 
said to live under. The whole thing has come up for con- 
sideration in all its aspects. We are placed in a dilemma 
by our long admiration and imitation of certain aspects of 
German organisation. We find that there is a philosophy 
of nationalism for Germany which is fairly consistent in 
its economic and political teachings, and gathers round the 
main idea that the State is Power. This has checked our 
admiration for her culture, and eminent men have begun 
to urge that her science, philosophy, and organisation have 
been greatly over-rated. The war will end, and we must 
find a modus vivendi again, and much of this new criticism of 
German culture will subside. We must seek to understand 
the ferment of German thought which has produced this 

316 



316 GERMAN CULTURE 

clash of arms, if only that the settlement may be a peace. 
But there will also be the gain that thereby we shall be able 
to understand even our own position better. For some of the 
main ideas of German nationalism have been taught in this 
country. They have been food for us, even if they have 
become poison for her. We have been and are Pan-British 
as they have become Pan-German. Their philosophy of the 
question is more reasoned, because they came late into some 
fields of activity and have had to strive for things to which 
we more easily fell heirs. It is a union of economic and 
political tendencies, the fruition of both being in the 
Weltpolitik, The defeat of the latter must react on much 
of the organisation of which it has been regarded as the 
full expression. More than seventy years ago List drew 
up a programme for Germany, the main ideas of which 
still govern her economic policy ; but this programme is 
incomplete, and the other efforts at organisation fail of 
their chief purpose, if the politics cannot supplement 
the economics. Power, he said, must be the economic 
aim of the nation ; and the great historian, Treitschke, 
clinched it from the political side by the same ideal of 
Power. Whatever this may now have become, it was not 
in its origin materialistic. On the contrary, List believed 
that he was leading a reaction against the materialism 
of Adam Smith. And to Treitschke also the idea that 
the State must be mighty was not the idea that might is 
right. As to both home and foreign politics he rejects this. 
But the teaching of masters reaches the forum in the form 
of phrases and maxims, and " the State is Power *' is a 
dangerous maxim out of their hands. When we understand 
the full content of List's maxim we shall know whether this 
war is against German " culture '* or if it is against a 
degraded use of his teaching ; or if it is simply a clash of 
ideals and arms. 

War itself, the occasion of its outbreak, the incidents 
of preliminary negotiation, and the methods by which it is 
waged, necessarily bias the judgment on all the forces which 



POLITICS 317 

have long been preparing it. The rights of small nations 
have come across the direct issue between England and 
Germany. But we get out of this particular confusion, 
so disastrous to any patient attempt to understand Ger- 
many's true historical position, by turning to such a study 
of the larger issues as has been presented in Professor 
Cramb's Germany and England, Here is a generous 
estimate of the ambitions to which the nation has been led 
by great teachers ; and the moral is that war, somehow and 
sometime, was the fated outcome of the growth in Germany 
of a national ideal in which we had preceded her. Speaking 
early in 1913, he could " see no issue to the present collision 
of ideals but a tragic issue. ... If Germany has not 
declined from her ancient valour, the issue is certain and 
speedy. It is war.'' And it will, he concludes, be simply 
a war of ideals, justly held on both sides. A nation which 
has made good, and wishes to write a political science of 
internationalism and peace, must reckon with the new- 
comer into a limited world. But this is an impasse. If 
colonial empire matters to full nationality (and this is im- 
plied), then it would not be right for Germany to lay aside 
her ambitions, whatever the outcome of a war. The result 
is not war but wars. ' " Friendly rivalry," he puts aside as 
a mere phrase not suited to this sphere of discussion. Then 
what follows ? The " right " and even the " duty " to make 
war are advocated by Bernhardi, and this we call militarism. 
The best we can get out of it is Treitschke's belief that wars 
will be fewer and intenser ; just the development in 
foreign politics which will correspond to the prevailing 
view on strikes at home. But war will take a new place 
in the writing of political science. Professor Cramb even 
thinks there will be a struggle of religious ideals. All this 
because he concedes main facts in the pohcy and study of 
nationalism. 

This conflict arises because nationalism has developed 
in each nation similar ideals of the final purposes of the State. 
Can it be avoided by any tenable philosophy of distinct 



318 GERMAN CULTURE 

national ideals ? A favourite doctrine of List, for ex- 
ample, is the relativity of State policy, but he uses it only 
with reference to the stage in time which any nation has 
reached. Should the aims of nations not also be relative 
to different kinds of genius ? The struggle to survive be- 
tween nations would then be modified by a kind of selection 
that is different from " natural selection/' Professor 
James Ward has shown how, even in the biological sphere, 
natural selection is mitigated by " subjective '' selection, 
since different organisms seek their subsistence in diverse 
ways, and do not all compete for the same means of liveli- 
hood. If pheasants are interested in mangolds, fly-catchers 
are not. Areas of strife may overlap, but they do not co- 
incide. Is it possible that ideals of national prestige and 
power may thus seek their expression along different lines ? 
This has been suggested as a result of the war. Let the 
genius of Germany continue to make its impress on the 
world in art, in the patience and fullness of scientific 
research, in technical discovery, in such conceptions of 
organisation as are shown in her much-studied Poor-Law 
system, the industrial discipline of Cartels, the fine arrange- 
ment of her great cities. Let England make her special 
contribution in the sphere of colonisation and government. 
The lines of progress will cease to be competitive and will 
fall along the traditional paths of each country's advance. 
Now, in the first place, we are not in a position seriously to 
propose this solution. We are not willing to abate the 
energy with which we have pursued Germany in any of her 
special activities. We subsidise technical science, and intend 
to overtake her in that race as soon as we can ; we study 
her organisations in order to profit by them. How if she 
does the same in our particular field of world poUtics, 
sea-power, and colonisation ? But, in the second place, it 
is a mere fact that no such idea would be entertained in a 
nation of the size and influence of Germany. The Welt- 
politik is the crown of other national organisation, its fullest 
expression and greatest opportunity. As we shall see. 



POLITICS 319 

even in England, it has been held that there is a profound 
reaction of such external striving on the vigour of other 
ideals and the faith with which they are worked out at home. 

There is, in fact, something in the life of great nations 
that is analogous to the missionary activity of a Church. 
I have heard the head of a great missionary organisation 
explain how the efforts of the Church in foreign places were 
quite essential to the fullness of its life at home ; that a 
Church which had not the missionary idea would lose faith 
in its principles and ideals ; that this reaction was so 
fundamental that missions must be regarded not as an 
addition to, but as an integral part of, organised religious 
life. This is precisely the spirit in which the colonial 
question was approached by Treitschke. Nationality cannot 
impress itself through emigrants who lose their nationality. 
Professor Cramb speaks of it as the endeavour of England 
in her colonial policy " to give all men within its bounds 
an English mind.'' Even in industrial affairs it is often 
found how there comes a time in the growth of a business 
when a man who has seen it grow will continue, long after 
profit has ceased to be a main motive, to devote himself to 
its development, because it has become almost his per- 
sonality. The force of this missionary idea has been felt 
in Germany, which has no adequate colonial outlet, much 
more than in France, which has a much greater outlet. 
That is one reason why the Germano-British antagonism is 
the engrossing feature of the present war. 

Of course, we may say that a nation must realise accom- 
plished facts ; that " the true enemies of Germany are 
history and geography." She has come late into this field, 
and the New World is limited. There is a command against 
covetousness. But history is not a closed record, nor an 
impersonal force. Men and nations will continue to make 
history for centuries to come. And so, say the Germans, 
"we give the past to England.'' But how many forms of 
possible development in the long future would be barred if 
Germany now gave up the imperial idea ? 



320 GERMAN CULTURE 

It is not in this, but in another sense, that history is 
against Germany. The world cannot be put back to the 
position as it was when European colonisation began, and 
Germany was too much occupied with contests nearer 
home. A great part of the work of colonisation is done, 
not in the geographical sense, that the space is occupied, 
but in the human sense, that order exists, there is developed 
trade, barbarism and savagery are rooted out. This is 
done, the honour has been won, and the pride and prestige 
are founded in the honour. It is possible for another nation, 
if it has the force of arms, to obtain now the pride of 
colonies, but not the same honour. The New World is now 
old enough for many colonial institutions to be studied and 
imitated by the mother country. It will soon be impos- 
sible, if it is not so already, to speak of colonisation at all 
in the original sense of the word. And to this, therefore, 
Germany has but one answer : " Let us make haste,'* The 
Empire has an " hour of destiny.'* 

And it is not only from the point of view of colonial 
occupation that "the hour'* had to come soon, if it were 
not to be missed. There is the influence, on the less de- 
veloped nations, of the prestige and influence of European 
Powers to be reckoned. Western art, literature, and civic 
organisation will not impress them so immediately as will 
language, commerce, sea-power, and the flag. Towards 
whom will China lean as she is unwillingly dragged into the 
nexus of world-politics ? The English language is taught 
in her schools and colleges. A little longer, and the East 
will have "set/' if not toward England herself, at any 
rate toward English-speaking peoples. Except in South 
America, EngHsh is becoming the language of commerce 
and international intercourse. Germany has to contend in 
respect of this penetrative influence not only with the 
British Empire, but also with the United States. If there 
is time, there is no more than time, to work against this 
powerful tendency. 

There; have long been philosophies of the State, the basis 



POLITICS 321 

of rights and duties, the final sanctions of law. What now 
appears is an applied philosophy, relative in its point of 
view, tending to. nationalise political science, just as religion 
is sometimes nationalised in churches. In economics and 
politics, science is always liable to lean over into policy. 
It may be called "theoretical '' if it does not, the opposite 
being " propagandist '' rather than " practical. '* What are 
called the " exact '' sciences are not under this tension. 
One feels, in the exposition of nationalism, an adaptation 
of science to policy, and yet it is written as science. A 
fundamental idea is the relativity, not the universality, of 
truth as to national duties and claims. Though excursions 
are made into the universal statement now and then, that 
is rather to strengthen and sanction an opinion, and the 
real question is, not as to States and their bases, but as to 
principles and policies for States in Europe at the opening 
of the twentieth century. It is for that reason that the 
quasi-scientific study of states leads to impasse, A demon- 
stration is made, for example, by an English authority of 
the influence on nationality of colonial enterprise ; the 
reasoning is taken up in Germany, but this attempt to 
extend it defeats it. Mr. Angell shows up the same dilemma 
in regard to armaments. In some cases, such as List, 
there is an escape from the conclusions, because they hold 
in reserve an opinion that the whole thing is provisional, 
pending the achievement of internationalism or federation, 
which is the final ideal, and will give a true and consistent 
science. But Treitschke will not have, even as an ideal, 
this pooling of the special gifts and aims of nations. The 
State must be sovereign, and trustee for certain forms of 
culture, which it must not debase or reduce to an average. 
Naturally, therefore, from such an impasse as Professor 
Cramb leads up to, there emerges the philosophy of war, 
and the future is entrusted to opportunism, personality, 
and catastrophe. And if war, like the strike, is put in the 
place of arbiter, there may be, in one case as in the other, 
an exposition of more thorough methods of carrying it on. 

X 



322 GERMAN CULTURE 

The last questions in politics and economics will not be 
solved politically or economically ; it will depend on educa- 
tion and the reality, in its widest meaning, of religion. 

In the philosophy that is presented to-day there are 
two main elements — a political and an economic. These 
reinforce each other. List starts in economics, and is 
carried on to a wide political policy ; Treitschke has politi- 
cal aims before him in the first instance. It will make at 
any rate for understanding of their results if we examine 
their teaching in the light of what has been said in this 
country on the same question. 



II 

Let us consider world-politics first. The book which 
did most in recent times to awaken England to the Pan- 
British or imperialist idea was Seeley's Expansion of 
England. Many of the fundamental positions of Treitschke 
are to be found in Seeley's work. He has even a good word 
for the Prussianising of Germany. " Now/' he asks, *' after 
a hundred and fifty years, what political experiment of 
the eighteenth century can be named which has been so 
strikingly successful ? '' His philosophy of States and 
colonial empires has remarkable similarities to that which 
was being propounded by the great German historian. His 
political arguments for colonies are similar to Treitschke's, 
and his bias for large nations is as evident. He feared that 
England was losing hold of a point of view which Treitschke 
was urging Germany to realise. 

We must read the history of England, Seeley urges, not 
merely with a student's interest, but "in order to set us 
thinking about the future, and divining the destiny that is 
reserved for us/' And we must consider the fate of the 
nations which have lost their old rank. *' Some countries, 
such as Holland and Sweden, might pardonably regard 
their history as in a manner wound up. They were once 
great, but the conditions of their greatness have passed 



POLITICS 823 

away. . . . The only practical lesson of their history is a 
lesson of resignation/' But, though bigness is not every- 
thing, the great fact of British history has been the founda- 
tion of Greater Britain, or the '' English Exodus." This 
tendency has been *' profound, persistent, necessary to the 
national life'' We must hold to its results if we are not to 
*' expose our trade to wholly new risks," if we are to remain 
in the " first rank of States, and in a higher rank than the 
States of the Continent." Those nations which have in 
turn obtained maritime power, and come in contact with 
the New World, have grown to greater strength in arts, 
industry, and letters by the reaction on home life of the 
" civilising sea." Italy, Venice, Holland, and England are 
quoted to show how nations are unified and organised when 
they enter on the maritime stage. It is the struggle for 
the New World which '' more than anything else has placed 
these nations, where they never were before, in the van of 
intellectual progress, and especially it is by her success in 
this field that our own country has acquired her peculiar 
greatness." The most recent inventions in transport and 
communication have rendered even closer political imions 
possible ; while these same inventions " tend to make 
States which are on the old scale of magnitude " — mark 
the adjectives — '' unsafe, insignificant, second-rate." And, 
finally, it is not absolute, but relative magnitude which 
counts. So that he leads us up to a final question, aimed 
at making this nation care to hold what has been won, 
because the holding of it under the flag is more vital now 
than it was before. ''We often hear abstract panegyrics 
on the happiness of small States. But a small State among 
small States is one thing, and a small State among large 
States quite another. ... If it be true that a larger type 
of State than any hitherto known is springing up in the 
world, is not this a serious consideration for those States 
which rise only to the old level of magnitude ?*' In half a 
century *' Russia and the United States will surpass in 
power the States now called great. ... Is not this a serious 



324 GERMAN CULTURE 

consideration, and is it not especially so for a State like 
England, which has the choice between two courses of 
action, one of which may set it in that future age on a level 
with the greatest of these great States of the future, while 
the other will reduce it to the level of a purely European Power 
looking back, as Spain does now, to the great days when 
she pretended to be a world-state/' It is needless to 
emphasize the moral of this reasoning. Amid the ex- 
pansion of other empires, Germany has given an affirma- 
tive answer to the question—'' if this is not a serious 
consideration." We may not agree with the reasoning, but 
it was meant to and did influence British thought, and is 
not far apart from that which, with different elaboration 
of detail, but the same outlook on world-conditions, was 
setting the idea of expansion before Germany, as an integral 
element of what Seeley called the '' significance *' or " first- 
rateness '' of a modem State. Great as the Empire was in 
1884, when this argument was set forth, we have done 
even more since then than he was disposed to urge. France, 
even with a declining population, has made herself the 
second colonial Power. And it is to this, as yet, purely 
political ideal of significance and prestige that expression 
is given by Treitschke. " All great nations, when they 
become strong, have felt the desire to impress the seal of 
their culture on barbaric lands. . . . The nation which does 
not take a share in this great rivalry will play a pitiful 
part at some later time. It is a vital question now for a 
great nation to show a desire for colonies.'* 

A parallel might indeed be drawn here between the inter- 
national problem thus created and the social problem at 
home. The latter arises out of the inequality with which 
the means of life are distributed. It is felt that the means 
of life should be subject to some principle of a minimum of 
distribution to all citizens ; because they are vital to Ufe. 
It will be seen that the tenor of such argument as Seeley 
and Treitschke have put forward is that great nations too 
have, among the vital necessities of continued greatness, this 



POLITICS 325 

outward attitude toward the New World. But the means 
are hmited internationally, as they are not limited socially. 
There is a remedy in the latter case by the growth in the 
sum total of wealth. So there is an acute *' social problem " 
for nations if these colonial theories are true. Within 
States, the distribution problem becomes more urgent as 
knowledge of facts and possibilities grows ; and so, between 
States, a time came when Germany, hitherto involved in 
even more urgent questions of European politics, became 
aware of other nations' privileges, and claimed a share in 
this new wealth. The analogy might be carried a little 
further. Next to not having a full share in new wealth, 
there is in the social agitation a bitterness arising from the 
feeling that some people go on creating it to the increasing 
advantage of others ; the nexus of the economic system 
brings this about. So with the strength of a nation which 
emigrates to colonise for another State. Seeley describes 
it as "a strange question '' to ask why we need have 
colonies " of our own.*' " How much of our most valuable 
energies/' says Treitschke, " have we lost through emigra- 
tion, and are still losing, without obtaining the slightest 
compensation." A kind of ** surplus value " goes to an- 
other nation, if this theory of colonies is accepted. 

English people have become accustomed to a certain idea 
of the map of the world, and it is not easy to realise the 
outlook of Germany on the results of our expansion. And 
in a national song on this "land of hope and glory " the 
wish of its people is that '' wider still and wider may thy 
bounds be set." If we had this song, with only a few not 
very habitable colonies ! That is how Germans sing 
"Deutschland liber AUes." We have not only to make a 
settlement after the war, but to make peace. And for that 
purpose we must at least understand the fact that the new 
wine of Imperialism has got into the old bottle of a European 
frontier. Anyone who has seen how our flag and language 
dominate the highways of the world must mingle his pride 
with wonder at this singular development. 



326 GERMAN CULTURE 

Seeley speaks of the ''civilising sea/' meaning to say 
that nations which have obtained great maritime power 
are thereby braced in all aspects of their home life and 
energy. " England owes its modem character and its 
peculiar greatness from the outset to the New World." 
The " intellectual stimulus '' which the sea gave to the Low 
Countries made Holland " take the lead in scholarship 
and in commerce. '* They owed to it the work of Scaliger 
and Descartes as well as of Van Tromp. Treitschke takes 
the same view, and explains by it that undefined instinct 
which at all times has attracted nations to seek a future 
on the ocean. Indeed, in the work of both List and 
Treitschke there are phrases which almost imply that it 
is worth while to have colonies just in order that, or because, 
there must be a navy to protect them, and a mercantile 
marine will grow out of this relation. There is a prestige 
in sea-power that is due perhaps to an unconscious appli- 
cation of Seeley 's favourite word "significance.'' A great 
ship is the finest thing we make. It might leave us cold to 
know that another nation possessed more than half of, say, 
the glass-bottle industry of the world. It w^ould not leave 
us cold if we had to accept the same result as regards the 
mercantile marine. Our shipping is an activity which 
obtrudes itself on the view of the whole world, as other 
industries do not ; it is an obvious outgoing of our 
energy, something that is not shown only in statistics. It 
belongs to our "significance." It is another aspect of 
the same tendency that nations think so much of their 
export trade in reckoning their international position. 



Ill 

The economic aspects of nationalism in Germany bring us 
specially into contact with the great name of Friedrich 
List, the author of a tendency which has prevailed in that 
country toward a relative, an historical, and in consequence 
a social view of economic development. Early in the 



POLITICS 827 

nineteenth century a so-called " classical school '' existed 
in Germany, and the influence of Adam Smith's ideas of 
the " natural system '' was considerable. Few books have 
been more misunderstood than the Wealth of Nations be- 
cause few people have read it through. The great bulk of 
the inductive and historical work which the author did 
sinks out of sight, and a few passages on the "natural 
system '' of trade are remembered, exaggerated, and taken 
out of their historical context. It was a cruel question 
which was put in a school examination paper, which asked 
the pupils to " Tell all you know about King Alfred, 
omitting the story of the burnt cakes " ; and it would 
equally embarrass many people who quote him were they 
asked to tell all they know of Adam Smith, omitting the 
question of laissez faire (a phrase which he does not use). 
There has also been the reaction from writers of greater 
abstractness, such as Bastiat, and Smith has had some of 
the general blame put upon him, just because he was the 
great name among all those of his time. His influence 
reached Germany both directly and indirectly, not only 
affecting some professional teachers, but enforcing the 
idealist habits of thought which prevailed in the eighteenth 
century. Von Thunen and Lorenz Stein are the most im- 
portant names, and "the school'' against which List 
directed his attack included journalists and popular writers 
to whom the clean-cut idea of the "natural system'' 
commended itself. The tendency of this teaching, and of 
Smith's critique of systems of restriction, at any rate in the 
partial and often derived form in which it reached Germany, 
was toward cosmopolitan or "international" ideals of 
economic activity. A pure individualism will lead to this 
kind of internationalism, since the producer will consider 
only the most profitable outlet for labour and capital. 
Though there are abundant corrections of this in the Wealth 
of Nations, and the " natural system " has in that book in 
any case a limited sphere (the investment of capital and 
sale of labour), still it is an idea which, once it is taken 



328 GERMAN CULTURE 

hold of, has great momentum of its own, and it was to this 
momentum that the extremer developments were due. 
It is evident that List himself had either read Smith 
hurriedly and partially, or was opposing the pupils rather 
than the master, or, as he suggests in his own book, was 
deliberately exaggerating for the sake of a clearer issue. 
He was not an economic teacher ; but in his troubled and 
wandering life he had read, as he claimed, " the book of 
actual life/' And the force with which he wrote the 
National System of Political Economy made him both the 
founder of German protection and the forerunner of the 
" historical school '* which has since been prevalent. Knies, 
Roscher, SchmoUer, and the " Socialists of the Chair " 
continued the development. The question is one of em- 
phasis ; the history of organisation cannot be identified with 
the science of organisation, and there is as much theory 
in the writings of the eminent leaders of German economic 
thought as there was of historical study in Adam Smith. 

It is plain that a historical bias will lead to a relative 
view of economic policy. Nations are at different economic 
stages, and have followed different lines of evolution, the 
economic and political conditions reacting on each other. 
By showing up this relativity, the historical method tends 
naturally to emphasize the need for independent policies, 
so that each nation may provide for its own economic 
development according to its stage of poHtical and 
economic growth. This is not, in fact, a study of economics 
but of economic policy ; or of the right application of eco- 
nomic cause and effect in view of the whole requirements 
of national life. Economic science is drawn into public 
controversy as most sciences are not ; and the science is 
made to appear relative and provisional when in fact it is 
to the policy that these words apply. The geology of 
Germany is different from that of England, but geological 
science is not on that account relative and provisional ; 
though the problem of locating and using coal-measures 
would be relative to the different geological facts. The 



V 



POLITICS 329 

whole of the discussion which the historical school has 
raised must be considered, not only in the light of the 
contrast of policy and science in economic affairs, but also 
in view of another distinction which has had to be made 
plain. An historical school will be predominantly a fact- 
school ; a collector and classifier of material, and suspicious 
of pure deduction. The modern German scientific mind 
loves to move in these regions of research. And it tends to 
emphasize a distinction which ought not to be a cause of 
strife, but ought to remain as a distinction only, that which 
exists between thought-books and fact-books. Neither can 
get on without the other ; and the division of labour is a 
question of temperament, whether individual or national. 

The effect of the historical method on Germany's con- 
tribution to modern economics has been variously estimated. 
The Italian Cossa, in his review of schools and tendencies, 
held that the German school had " gone off at a tangent, 
denied the existence of general laws, led young men out of 
the way of theoretical investigation, turned every one of 
them to the study of history or politics," and thus it " stands 
convicted of a narrowness of view not less flagrant than 
that of the French optimistic school." The Germans, he 
elsewhere says, " encourage each other in the hope of 
exorcising political economy, by riveting their eyes upon 
historical minutiae." It is true that the historical or descrip- 
tive monograph is the special contribution of Germany, 
and that this can run to seed in mere detail. But the 
German professors have not limited their outlook to Ger- 
many ; they have taken the whole world for their pro- 
vince, and produced mmierous valuable studies in British, 
Russian, and American development. Professor Hasbach, 
the historian of the English agricultural labourer, has made 
the claim that to Germany has fallen " the lion's share of 
all the research in economic history." And we ow^e to this 
organised force of investigators such great international 
works as Conrad's Dictionary and Schonberg's Text-book. 
The danger is that this method of study, undertaken in 



830 GERMAN CULTURE 



^' 



reaction against dogma, will itself create a dogma, since 
facts can be viewed with an historical, as well as with a 
theoretical prejudice. Economics is so closely related to 
questions of public policy and social reform that many 
people, who have not the faculty of analysis, will still 
desire to work in the field, and give themselves to descrip- 
tive or historical work ; and so we get the fact-books, of 
which the thought-books must constantly take account, 
but whose sequences and classifications must stand analysis 
and cannot usurp its place. If one may judge by such a 
writer as Professor Cohn, a member of the Eisenach Con- 
gress of 1872, the last forty years have lessened the opposi- 
tion of German schools. In 1873, in the controversy 
against Manchestertum in Germany, he wrote that no prin- 
ciple of, for example, banking could be set up until all the 
facts about banking in every country where banking exists 
had been collected ; and that the same labour must be 
gone through in every other economic field ; so that a 
complete compendium of all facts preceded the study of 
principles. By this test, no science could have principles. 
But, thirty years later, the same writer has come to the 
more moderate position that, while the historical standpoint 
has great merits, it no longer stands in real opposition to 
deductive or theoretical science. The cultivation of the 
historical tendency in political economy " only serves to 
bring the importance of logical method into stronger relief. 
We can dispense with more or less unreliable accumulations 
of facts — never with thought or clearness of thinking." 
And the German " schools " are, in his view, now becoming 
less defined, as initiative becomes too strong for tradition. 

The historical school would tend toward nationalist ideas 
of trade policy, because of the perception of stages of growth/ 
This is a fundamental position with List. But also, in 
the internal affairs of the nation, it would reinforce pro- 
posals for the action of the State. The study of past changes 
raises questions of right and wrong, as the static analysis 
of systems cannot so saliently do. The problems of land 



POLITICS 331 

and labour are everywhere affected by the merits of certain 
historical transitions. It was not unnatural that the his- 
torical methods of the newer German economic teachers 
should commend themselves to that group who, after the 
Eisenach Congress of 1872, became known as the '* Socialists 
of the Chair." ^ Problems which are shown to involve re- 
dress, restoration, and compensation lead, since the past 
cannot be called to account, to claims on the nation and the 
action of the State. So that the historical school has 
fostered a nationalism in public policy which works to- 
ward both the economic unity of the nation at home, and 
its self-conservation in outward relations. 

Born in 1789, List became in 18 19 the president and 
adviser of a league of German manufacturers who saw ruin 
to their industry in the removal of the blockade, and the 
coming inrush of British goods. But it was especially 
the growth of American industry which impressed him, 
and turned him from the teachings of '' the school." From 
1841 to 1844, after his travels, he published the system which 
'* is not based on a bottomless cosmopolitanism, but on the 
nature of things, on the teaching of history, and the needs 
of nations." The special feature of this system is to be 
nationality. The individual does not serve mankind best 
by looking after his own interest, and depending on 
'' economic harmonies " ; nor yet by cosmopolitan views 
of himian brotherhood which are only feasible in a long- 
distant commonwealth of Eiuope. The unit of active 
service is the State. List has no theory of the basis of the 
State. It is just the group of people who are organised 
under one government. In the times we have to deal with, 
indeed, the ancient bases of race and religion have not the 
same authority, since races overlap nations ; nationalism 
can get on with common interest, sanctified by the secondary 
religious force of tradition, mainly created by wars. List's 
is the most reasoned and complete philosophy of nationalism 

^ Or ** Academic Socialists," as their Association is not limited to University 
teachers. 



332 GERMAN CULTURE 

in its economico-political aspects ; and it is from the 
economic basis that he believes the more intellectual and 
moral energies arise. Seventy years ago, with great literary 
skill and freshness, he gave Germany a programme. 

The rise of the early German *' classical school," and the 
influence of Adam Smith, he explains by reference to the 
whole mental atmosphere of the time of Kant. In Germany 
mental culture preceded, while in other nations it followed, 
the growth of material interests and powers. He did not 
want Germany to have the fame of a professorial nation. 
'* The whole culture of Germany at present (1841) is 
theoretical. Hence those numerous unpractical and strange 
characteristics which other nations observe in us. Hence 
the German attachment to philosophic systems and cos- 
mopolitan dreams. The intellect, not allowed to move 
among the facts of the world, strove to exercise itself in the 
fields of speculation." ^ And in another place he has given 
a still more emphatic opinion on the view that world-power 
can be exercised by the culture of the " hrmianities " alone. 
" It is possible for a nation to have too many philosophers, 
philologers, and men of letters, and too few skilled work- 
men, merchants, and sailors. This is what results from a 
highly advanced and profound culture, which is not bal- 
anced by a highly advanced manufacturing power, and by 
great internal and foreign trade." The surplus of such a 
nation is *' a mass of useless books, subtle theoretical systems, 
and learned arguments, which do more to darken than to 
cultivate the mind of a nation, and withdraw it from useful 
occupations." This reaction against the idealism of the 
eighteenth century had taken place in other fields of German 
thought, in jurisprudence with such men as Savigny, and in 
social philosophy the organic ideal of Fichte went beyond 
the individualism of Kant. 

And yet some parts of his own argument are aesthetic 
in their statement, when he explains the harmony of a 
many-sided national development. And the general tenor 

1 The quotations are from Lloyd's translation. 



POLITICS 333 

of his reasoning cannot be called materialistic, for the 
spiritual results of material development are one of his 
main contentions. The State is the unit of the world's 
progress ; its activity cannot be based on an '' absolute '' 
philosophy ; relativism and the historical spirit are essential. 
The summary of the policy which will make a ''great, 
mighty, and rich*' nation, is given as "native manufac- 
tures, free internal intercourse, foreign trade, navigation, 
and naval power.'' Material in its terms, this is also the 
policy which will put a healthy strain on the national fibre, 
call out the patriotic imagination, create organised effort 
and lo^^alty, and improve to the highest the moral and 
spiritual outlook of the people. In the Politics, published in 
1844, he associates colonies with sea-power as part of the 
ideal, and claims Holland and Denmark for Germany. 

The argument is forcibly expressed, and in one point 
there is an important difference from the later statement of 
Treitschke. To List the cosmopolitan ideal is bad, not in 
itself, but because it is not practical politics. The ideas of 
Smith's '' school " would do very well in a federation of 
Europe for political purposes. Internationalism must not 
be partial ; all nations must be under one system of law 
if they are to be under one system of trade. There is a 
remarkable anticlimax in his eleventh chapter where, after 
showing the grandeur of the internationalist ideal, and also 
how by many inventions in communication this is being 
made more possible, he scraps the whole thing with the 
remark that it " has omitted to take into consideration the 
nature of nationalities and their special interests and con- 
ditions." In a true confederation, the spare capital of one 
district would flow over the whole area and increase every- 
where the material basis of higher development ; but, as 
things are, nations will keep their resources for themselves 
and their colonies, and kill the attempt to start new enter- 
prises abroad. Each nation must take its destiny in its 
own hands, and create for its own needs a full national 
economic policy, and other things will be added unto it 



334 GERMAN CULTURE 

thereby. When it can speak on equal economic termsj 
with England, that will be the time for Germany to con- 
sider cosmopolitan ideas again. 

But would not this development take place in Germany' 
in any case ? It is true, he argues, that experience teaches 
that " the wind bears the seed from one region to another ; 
but would it on that account be wise policy for the forester 
to wait until the wind in the course of ages effected this 
transformation '' ? Germany must assertively seize the 
chance, in view especially of the higher things which 
economic nationalism brings with it. 

What are these other things ? List calls them " the 
mental capital of the present human race.'' Some of the 
ablest sections of his argument are devoted to showing the 
relation of industrialism to culture, skill, national energy, 
education, social order, and a wide outlook on affairs. 
Law and free institutions help to the progress of industrial 
power, and in turn are helped by it ; it is in the industrial 
state that " friction produces sparks of the mind.*' He 
holds that Adam Smith gave too little attention to this 
aspect of industry, and too much to material values. It is 
only in the stir of the great industry that the highest type 
of life can grow. A State that is mainly agricultural will 
never be a great nation. It is " like a cripple '' with only 
one arm. This idea has taken many forms since List, 
There is a valuation of industries, in which agriculture 
stands low, and the iron and shipping trades high, a valua- 
tion made from the standpoint of prestige rather than 
profit. It is not its unprofitableness that List objects to 
in the agricultural state, but " dullness of mind, awkward- 
ness of body, obstinate adherence to old notions, customs, 
methods, and processes, want of culture, prosperity, and 
liberty.'' It has a " low idea of the value of time." Ger- 
many was to work for a culture rooted in experience of 
affairs, in the strain of industrialism on nerve and brain, 
and braced by the feeling of co-operation in a national 
purpose. The Trade-State is the basis of the Culture-State. 



POLITICS 335 

This is to be instead of Germany's old speculative culture, 
which turned her energy away from affairs. 

He was writing during the Free-Trade agitation in this 
country. He had, therefore, to remind Germany that the 
power of England was built up, as one organic whole, by 
a system that was not cosmopolitan. England was not to 
employ the " very clever device of kicking away the 
ladder,*' or expect other nations to adapt their policy to 
hers. 

List is an idealist, whether he speaks of internationalism 
or of nationalism. Cancel his internationalist hopes for the 
distant future, which such writers as Treitschke do not 
want to entertain on any terms, and List's National System 
is still the economic supplement of German political aspira- 
tion. That industrialism should be extended in the inte- 
rests of personality may seem a strange teaching now that 
the " social problem " is charged against this very industrial 
development. It can at any rate be said that in Germany 
the men who were influenced by List's point of view were 
not only the historical school, but also the Socialists of the 
Chair. They were much nearer to the Chair than to 
Socialism, but the Eisenach Congress and subsequent social 
forces in Germany have made them influential in those 
schemes of organisation which were meant to balance the 
evils of industrialism, and which have influenced social 
study all over the world. 

List's argument goes over into politics through the idea 
of security. Between the individual and mankind there is 
the nation. But is there not also the family, the city, the 
clan, and the nations that are within nations ? If the aim 
of this policy is in the end a non-material one of personal 
development, why are restrictions to be imposed only on 
the frontiers of the great national groups ? If it is good for 
Germany, why is it not good for Prussia alone ? Because 
of war ; and thus the question becomes economico-political. 
Foreign supply and demand are not to be depended on ; 
and it is obvious how this carries us over into the question 



336 GERMAN CULTURE 

of sea-power as an integral feature of nationality. And it 
gives List one of the fundamental ideas of his work ; just 
as to Treitschke the State is power, in its political aspects 
inward and outward, so to List it is power that matters to 
it economically, and not merely the present wealth gained 
by exchange. The State must have a reserve ; must be 
able to rely on itself against the stoppage of international 
economic exchange ; as *' the tree is more important than 
the fruit/' Here he believed he had found a weak spot in 
Smithianismus — the worship of mere exchange. " The idea 
of perpetual peace,'' he says, " forms the foundation of all 
Smith's reasonings " — a strange remark to make of the 
writer who held that " defence is of more importance than 
opulence." It is plain that this will carry us beyond the 
creation of such reserves and resources at home ; for there 
are products which are essential to industrialism — oils, 
fibres, giuns, chemicals — which no degree of protection 
could establish in a temperate zone. If there is to be an 
all-round reserve of power, this therefore implies colonies 
in the New World, and colonies imply a navy. The pro- 
gramme of Weltpolitik opens out on its economic side. 
*' Can it be deemed sensible to acknowledge the title to an 
entire quarter of the globe to vest in the man who first 
erected a pole adorned with a piece of silk ? " And hence 
" rectification of territory is in many cases a justifiable 
reason for war." 

The case for economic nationalism, in its fullest extent, 
has been developed since his time by arguments to which 
List was himself opposed ; but we are very familiar with 
them nowadays. He does not regard colonies as a neces- 
sary outlet for surplus population and products. This is 
a later development due to communication and transport 
and to the problem of markets. It cannot be said that 
there is a consistent opinion, either here or in Germany. It 
depends on the political mood of the time whether emigra- 
tion is regarded as a mark of distress at home, or as a con- 
tribution to the strength of the nation in the colonies. At 



POLITICS 337 

one time even colonial emigration is charged against our 
land system, as a thing which we can and ought to prevent 
by better laws at home ; at another time we are glad of the 
pioneers who are to unite the Empire, and prevent the 
Americanising of Canada. In Germany there has appeared, 
as there did recently here, the idea of colonies as an outlet for 
surplus, and therefore a necessary supplement of the healthy 
economic life of a modern State. Emigration, as distinct 
from colonisation, would supply the remedy, and does so 
at present ; but the political ideal of nationalism bars this 
as a permanent settlement of the question. Let us con- 
sider the statement of Seeley in 1884. " Colonies in the 
abstract,'* he says, *' are neither more nor less than a great 
augmentation of the national estate. They are lands for 
the landless, prosperity and wealth for those in straitened 
circumstances. . . . Never any nation was half so much 
cramped for want of room as our own nation is now. Popula- 
tions so dense as that of modern England are a phenomenon 
quite new at least in Europe." Not in Treitschke so much 
as in such men as Bernhardi, and in the current popular 
politics of Germany, this idea reappears. To Treitschke, it 
is the political mission of colonists that dominates the 
question. What are we to say of this economic claim, for 
it is put as a case of distress, giving a nation that is without 
habitable colonies the wretched choice between a social 
problem at home and the loss of the nationality of those 
who go abroad ? 

List did not support the idea. On the contrary, he held 
that Malthus was in error in fearing the growth of popula- 
tion beyond the means of subsistence. It is " mere nar- 
rowmindedness to consider the present extent of the 
productive forces as the test of how many persons could be 
supported on a given piece of land.'' Who is to set limits 
to discovery and invention ? Every nation draws on the 
whole world for supplies, and he saw no necessary end to 
this fimd, as new areas and processes would come into 
view. But to-day the idea of surplus in people or produce 

Y 



838 GERMAN CULTURE 

is felt to intensify the colonial claims ; and the position 
may be examined. 

How is it to be decided that a country has a surplus popu- 
lation to dispose of ? The general argument refers to the 
growth of the wants of a nation, its consuming power. 
And as nations grow in population, attention tends to be 
given to this side of the result specially. But if there are 
more mouths to feed, by the same result there are more 
hands to feed them. It is the task of social and industrial 
organisation to adjust to each other the increases in demand 
and supply. This does not mean that a nation must con- 
tinue to supply the wants of its people solely from the 
resources of its own land. It has no economic surplus so 
long as it can meet the problem by the use of both its 
own labour and capital, and the nexus of foreign trade. 
Its resources include exchange ; and this is also true of 
districts within a nation. It would be difficult to show that 
any nation had found this problem too much for it. The 
mere fact of emigration does not prove it. There is inevit- 
ably a movement of the population of the world from 
place to place ; not because they could not be maintained 
at home, but just because of the freedom of the will. There 
are the same movements within national frontiers. One 
occupation is given up for another, for reasons which are 
special to each case — friends, the location of industries, 
the attraction of the city or the New World. People are 
not adscripti glehce or civitati. Nations which emigrate 
largely may also immigrate largely ; this double movement 
obtains even in our own colonies. It would be difficult to 
put to the test of facts the grievance that is impUed in 
the idea of surplus population. The German overseas 
emigration, which is what Bemhardi counts, is only some 
20,000, and has fallen rapidly in the last twenty years. But 
we do not know the German emigration to other places in 
Europe, which must be reckoned in deciding this question 
of economic surplus. That it would matter to the argument 
is shown by the Belgian figures, which are more fully given. 



I 



I 



POLITICS 339 

and indicate that the emigration to Europe was nearly ten 
times the overseas movement in 1911. And there is the 
reverse movement to consider. Mr. Rowntree informs us that 
there is a shght but growing balance of immigration into 
Belgium ; and this is the densest of European countries. 
The problem of organisation has been met, so that although 
there is change of the people by foreign movements, this 
does not mean that the outward movement had distress 
behind it. The great emigrant countries of Europe — Italy 
and Austria — are not high in the scale of density. Were 
we to quote emigration as " surplus '' with the implication 
of distress, what would be made of the facts regarding 
Australia and New Zealand ? In 1909 and 1910 emigrants 
from New Zealand were 66,000, against 74,000 immigrants ; 
in Australia the same comparison gives 113,000 against 
179,000. The fact of the emigrant remains to be explained, 
spite of the balance of immigrants in these cases. It is, at 
least, too easy a disposal of the facts to equate emigration 
with "surplus'' of people. The second colonial empire is 
the French, and France has a declining population. There 
are cases, such as Ireland, where a failure of organisation 
promotes emigration, but it is not the usual case, and 
Germany would not accept such a contention about its 
industry. 

The argument is also based on surplus products. This 
is a hard idea to define, since foreign trade is not made up 
to any extent of forced sales. Colonies are good markets 
for a mother country, since language and preferences will 
expand her trade in that direction ; but this is not the same 
idea as existing undisposable surpluses. The world being 
limited, strong preference in new markets of great size in 
favour of some old countries might come to be a just ground 
for resentment in other countries. But there is one aspect 
of Germany's trade which is the probable cause of the idea 
in question. Her organisation is based on syndicates 
which, aided by her tariff, have been in the habit of keeping 
the home market under a restriction of output, while in 



340 GERMAN CULTURE 

order to gain the economies of " running full/' they make 
a larger supply and sell the balance abroad at lower prices 
than at home. This condition of things, though its results do 
not count for much in Germany's foreign trade, has at times 
drawn public attention to these exported "surpluses/' 
Colonisation would not affect this policy. Both as to 
population and products, the claims made are somewhat 
intangible. The international movement of people and 
goods, Uke the national one, is based on normal social and 
industrial forces, and detailed information would be re- 
quired to show that any part of it was forced. There 
is only the phrase, which identifies " outgoing " with 
" surplus." 

IV 

The idea of the State as Power will naturally react on 
the conception of civic duty and discipline. There are two 
ideals which on different grounds may be equally attractive 
— that of great personal freedom within the State, and that 
of great subordination to the purposes of the State. Each 
of these can be made the subject of either eulogy or criti- 
cism. They are harmonised or compromised by the idea 
that, as personality is only fully attained in civic and social 
life, personal freedom implies some degree of discipline, 
and is not the same as individualism. When that is granted, 
the nature of the personal freedom becomes largely one of 
the nature of States, and of the kind of national life with 
which the citizen has to identify himself. It was an essential 
idea of Kant's that true freedom lay in subjection to a law, 
and it has also been a religious maxim that '' service is 
perfect freedom." It depends upon the willingness of 
the service, and that in turn upon an understanding of the 
final purposes of obedience. It is therefore particularly 
useless to discuss the intensity of government in a foreign 
country like Germany without regard to its position in 
history and on the map. Treitschke argued that the State 



POLITICS 341 

is Power, but was quite consistent in saying also that there 
must not be too much of the State ; just as we in our political 
science say that the State is government, but the country 
must not be too much governed. The amount of govern- 
ment which a country must have is a question of pressures 
from without and within, and of reaction to these pressures. 
All is subject to the principle that the State must maintain 
itself, and that there is no limit to the right of self-defence. 
It must maintain itself, because it affords the environment 
within which a certain type of mankind can express and 
realise its genius. The argument for freedom has to be 
stated within the compass of this dominant and accepted 
fact. Different degrees of government are therefore wilUngly 
admitted in different nations, or in the same nation at differ- 
ent times. Thus we find Seeley, in his Political Science^ 
justifying the Prussianising of Germany as a success 
proved by the history of a hundred and fifty years ; and 
frankly defending acts of religious intolerance in this country 
as required by the exigencies of the time. The State was 
threatened ; that clears all other scores. Land frontiers 
have imposed on the great European nations forms of civic 
restriction which this country has escaped ; and, in current 
criticisms of German administration, we are apt to forget 
our own special good fortune. England is saved from the 
'' Continental climate " with its possible extremes of tension. 
We see in the German White Book how mobilisation is 
their main thought, while we are working for negotiation. 
That relativity of policies, political and economic, which 
the German *' historical school" has accepted since List, 
finds here another application. Prussia's position in Ger- 
many, and the citizens' " liberties " in Prussia, are difficult 
to criticise impartially in a nation which has made good in 
imperial politics, and has a sea frontier. It has recently 
been held by an eminent poHtician in England that " votes 
are to swords, what bank-notes are to gold." Whatever 
truth this has, is less remote and derived on the Continent 
than with us Treitschke's Essay on Liberty comes to the 



342 GERMAN CULTURE 

same conclusion as any other Essay on Liberty, that the 
State should not take more power than it requires. 

What is specially emphatic in his teaching is the doctrine 
of the '' sovereignty ** of the State. Among the loyalties 
of which people's lives are made up, he places the State's 
claim not only above other civic loyalties, but above man- 
kind. This is one of his main differences from List. 
Behind his teaching in this respect is the idea of trusteeship 
which has been already referred to, and his view of progress 
as a rivalry of genius and ideals. This is the idea which he 
vitalises with such statements as that *' the rays of the divine 
light only appear in individual nations infinitely broken ; 
every people has the right to believe that certain powers 
of the divine reason display themselves in it at their highest.*' 
In falling back on the *' divine plan," he follows German 
tradition ; German idealism has given this mental hinterland 
to her social philosophy. And it will be remembered that, 
in moments of patriotic fervour, this same principle of the 
" sovereignty " of the State has been asserted here in the 
maxim, '* My country, right or wrong." 

It follows that Treitschke regards some developments as 
impossible, notably the submission of national policy to 
the judgment of a tribunal of the nations. He does not 
say that this is impracticable, but that it is wrong. The 
State may limit itself by treaties — that is a voluntary and 
sovereign act ; but it may not limit itself absolutely, only 
with the reservation rehus sic stantibus ; a maxim stated in 
the same terms by Bismarck. This does not come to very 
much if it means only that " treaties which have outlived 
themselves must be denounced." It is not Treitschke's 
teaching which has been applied by the German mihtary 
authorities at the origin and during the conduct of the war. 
A man of no eminence by comparison — Bernhardi — has 
hardened the tone, and forgotten those qualifications of 
State policy which Treitschke advocated in opposition to 
Machiavelli. 

The doctrine of the sovereignty of the State is a high 



POLITICS 843 

application of the question of the rights of minorities. On 
any tribunal, a particular State or group would be a min- 
ority, and then what right has it to refuse the award of the 
majority ? What right does Ulster claim, and on what 
considerations does it throw us back ? A minority has a 
right, after the award, (i) if it represents one common ground 
of disagreement, not the sum of a number of different 
grievances, like the Cave of AduUam ; (2) if it represents a 
body localised enough for organisation, so that it can prove 
its conviction ; (3) if the ground of disagreement is more 
than a material interest, and goes back to such fundamentals 
as race and religion. A nation, in relation to a tribunal, 
is a minority of that kind. Its sovereignty depends on its 
trusteeship. Race and religion define nations in their later 
growth with lessening exactness ; but their place is taken, 
after frontiers have cut across nationalities and made States, 
by what is really a secondary religious influence — tradition, 
sanctified by war. "It is neither for government nor 
minister that the soldier falls. Lying there in agony, sinking 
into darkness, he has in himself the consciousness of this 
far greater thing, this mysterious, deathless, onward- 
stirring force, call it God, call it Destiny — but name it Eng- 
land. This is the spirit-purpose which binds century to 
century. '* So writes Professor Cramb, while claiming also 
that we dare not arraign the claims and ambitions of 
another nation whose great historian wrote in the same 
way of " the State that protected our forefathers with its 
justice ; which they defended with their bodies ; which 
the living are called upon to build further, and more highly 
developed children, and children's children, to inherit." For 
the defence of this inheritance it is claimed that *' Power 
is the principle of the State, as faith is of the Church, and 
love is of the family." Is it with this, or a perversion of 
it, that we are at war ? Is her militarism a true or a 
debased expression of German culture ? What have we 
gone forth to destroy ? 



IX 
GERMAN RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 

By Eev. W. p. PATERSON, D.D. 

Professor of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh 

In the famous Discourses on Religion, written in the times 
of the French Revolution, Schleiermacher made a passionate 
appeal to an irreligious generation, and gave his reasons 
for looking to Germany for the expected spiritual revival. 
*'It is no bhnd prejudice for the fatherland,'' he says, 
''which makes me address myself to my countrjrmen, but 
a profound conviction that they are the only people who 
are capable and worthy of being stirred to a sense of holy 
things. Yonder haughty islanders, by many unduly 
revered, know no watchwords save profit and happiness : 
their scientific zeal is a sham-fight, their philosophical dia- 
monds are of paste, and their sacred freedom is on the whole 
the tool of their self-interest. They take nothing seriously 
except what palpably pays. Similarly they know nothing 
of religion save that they have a bias for its time-honoured 
customs and dogmas, and regard it as a useful auxiUary in 
the struggle with their hereditary enemy. Still less, I 
confess, do I feel disposed to address myself to the French, 
who have lost all capacity of reverence, and whose rulers 
are arrogant enough to bid defiance to the eternal laws of 
the universe. For an audience I am driven back on the 
home-land, whose genial clime makes it a veritable garden 
of the spirit, and in which everything that adorns the life 
of man develops, at least by way of sample, in its fairest 
guise. It is, then, in Germany,'' he concludes, "that 
religion must find a sanctuary from the sheer barbarism 
and the chilled and worldly spirit of this age." ^ 

* Reden Hber die Religion^ Cap. I. 
345 



346 GERMAN CULTURE ^^^ 

The claim thus made by Schleiermacher might well have 
been couched in more modest and less truculent language. 
Yet he was not wrong in ascribing to his people an imusual 
capacity for religion. The German character is no doubt 
extremely complex. History and fiction alike reveal the 
widest diversity of individual types, and leave us puzzled 
as to how the same stock could throw off such classic 
examples both of the high-souled and warm-hearted idealist 
and of the coarse and selfish brute. Whatever the ex- 
planation, the national character imdoubtedly has a store 
of qualities which pay abundant tribute to the world and 
the flesh, and it likewise contains a root of piety which has 
flowered in religious heroes and epoch-makers, in noted 
saints, sweet singers, and philanthropists, and also in a 
multitude of nameless folk, known as " the quiet in the 
land,'' who made religion seem to their children and their 
friends to be the fairest flower of the human spirit. The 
people may also claim to have been entrusted with a 
religious mission. The paganism of the ancient Germans 
had a note of moral earnestness and even sublimity, while 
in Christian times there have been two occasions when the 
German mind has asserted a title to the leadership in 
religious thought. 



A. Teutonic Heathendom 

Light is thrown on the religion of the ancient Germans 
from a variety of sources — the accounts of Caesar and 
Tacitus, notices in early ecclesiastical writers, survivals in 
northern folk-lore, and especially the Eddas, which worked 
up the traditions and the mythology of the Scandinavian 
branch of the Germanic family. The nucleus was the 
religion of the primitive Aryans. These believed, like their 
neighbours of earlier race, in ghosts and demons, and they 
trafficked in occult powers and magical rites, but they had 
also groped after a better manifestation of the Highest, 



RELIGION 347 

and they dimly discerned the divine in the great objects 
and forces of nature. The spiritual inheritance was de- 
veloped in similar fashion by the Aryan tribes who settled 
in Northern India, and by the Teutonic stock which estab- 
lished itself in the regions of Northern and Central Europe. 
Like their Oriental kindred, the Germanic family continued 
to be in bondage to animistic superstitions, such as invest 
the lot of the savage tribes of to-day with deep gloom and 
manifold terrors. A considerable part of the business of 
life was to conciliate the goodwill, and to frustrate the 
machinations, of evil-minded or capricious spirits. Guid- 
ance was sought, both for public and private affairs, from 
dreams, omens, and the casting of lots. They were less ad- 
dicted to sacrifice, according to Caesar, than the Gauls, but it 
was still common, and in time of great peril or calamity they 
sought to appease the angry gods with the blood of human 
victims. But the Germans also guarded the better deposit 
from the Aryan tradition, developed a doctrine of the gods 
which is at least as elevated as that of the Indian Vedas, 
and also found some recognition in religion for the claims 
of morality. The ancient Germanic divinities, whose names 
are enshrined in our days of the week from Tuesday to 
Friday, had the same origin and significance as Indra and 
Agni, and the other " shining ones ** of the Indian creed. 
What Carlyle says of the old northland mythology goes to 
the heart of the matter — " I find it to be the impersonation 
of the visible workings of nature, earnest, simple recogni- 
tion of the workings of nature as a thing wholly miraculous, 
stupendous, and divine.'' ^ There was also a marked 
tendency, as in the Vedic religion, to magnify the attributes 
and works of some one of the great divinities until the mind 
came within measurable distance of recognising the supreme 
and only God. Tys or Tyr, the supreme deity of the oldest 
period, fell later into the background. Wuotan, Wodan, 
or Odin, originally perhaps a personification of the wind, 
became the god of battles, and also the creator and pre- 

* Lectures on Heroes ^ I. 



848 GERMAN CULTURE 

server, the dispenser of the blessings of civilisation, and the 
ruler of the world. Donar or Thor, originally the god of 
thunder, and later the patron of agriculture, was likewise 
exalted in popular homage above all other gods. There is 
ground for supposing that Thor was the best-loved god in an 
earlier and ruder stage, and that he was gradually ecUpsed 
by Odin the All-father as the life of the people became 
richer and more refined.^ Tacitus declares that the Germans 
had neither images nor temples : they thought that the 
gods were too great to be represented after the similitude of 
a man, and they deemed the forest or the grove, and not a 
temple made with hands, to be the fitting abode of the 
divinity .2 He was mistaken about the absence of temples 
and the proscription of images, but he may have had in- 
formation which enabled him to vouch for a strain of 
spirituaUty in the religion of the ruling class. It may be 
said with more confidence that among the Germans the 
all-important step was taken of weaving together religion 
and morality, and that they went further than any people 
save the Persians in developing Aryan religion under a 
sense of the paramount claims of conscience, and of the 
infinite difference between moral good and evil. Odin 
was interested in good morals as well as in battles. The 
Teutonic tradition supplied the name of Hell, as well as 
ideas of future punishment, to be a terror to evil-doers. 
As in the old-Persian faith, the secret of the universe was 
conceived to be a sustained and not unequal conflict be- 
tween the powers of light and darkness, who also stood for 
the contrast of righteousness and wickedness ; and it was 
in the spirit of the common Germanic inheritance, if also 
with some admixture of Christian elements, that the 
northern skalds perfected their sublime world-drama which 
told of the warfare of the gods and the giants, the craft 
of Loki, the death of Balder, the twilight of the gods, the 
destruction of the frame of things, and the final redemption 

^ Craigie, Religion of Ancient Scandinavia, 
* 0ermaniat 9, 



RELIGION 349 

and blessedness of gods and men in a rejuvenated and 
abiding universe. 

The adhesion of the Germanic tribes to Christianity 
began in the fourth century with the conversion of the 
Goths, who had made their way across the Carpathians 
into the valley of the Danube, and the process was com- 
pleted seven centuries later when Norway was reluctantly 
shepherded into the pale of Christendom. The Goths, who 
heralded the Teutonic migrations that overwhelmed the 
Roman Empire, had received Christianity in the heretical 
form of Arianism. The Franks, who established a German 
dominion in Gaul, the Angles and Saxons who swept the 
Romanised Celts before them with the besom of destruction 
in England and Lowland Scotland, and the main body 
which clung to their ancestral seats in central and northern 
Europe, all fought their battles under the protection of 
Thor and Odin, and after their conversion they accepted 
the Catholic form of faith as it had been fixed at Nicsea 
and endorsed by the authority of Rome. It is somewhat 
of a problem why the German tribes became Christian. In 
these days it was held self-evident that the power of a God 
and the worth of a religion were tested, alike for nation 
and individual, by the success and prosperity which they 
secured, and it might well have been thought foolish to 
desert the gods, under whose sign they had prevailed, for 
the powers which had proved unable to defend and preserve 
the Empire of the Latin race. The Christian code of 
morals, moreover, inculcating as it did meekness, love 
to man as man, and the forgiveness of injuries, seemed 
little calculated to make a sympathetic appeal to the spirit 
and taste of the conquering and plundering hordes. If 
there be any truth in Nietzsche's contention that the 
population of the Roman Empire accepted Christianity 
because it had become enslaved and decadent, it ought to 
have been utterly repugnant to the virile and liberty-loving 
peoples which smote down the tottering fabric of the 
Empire, and at least supplied the racial material for a fresh 



350 GERMAN CULTURE 

chapter of great achievement in the history of the race. 
The motives of the barbarians in embracing the Christian 
faith were doubtless very mixed. A good deal of evidence 
can be adduced in support of the case that the change of 
religion was due to self-interest, or superstition, or to the 
mere statecraft of the rulers. When the Goths were pushed 
and harassed by the Huns, they were admitted by Valens 
to the security of the Roman territories on the Danube on 
the condition that they should all abandon heathenism and 
conform to the rehgion of the Empire. It is related that 
Chlodwig, when hard-pressed in a great battle, vowed 
henceforth to serve the Christ in whom his consort believed 
if He would give him victory, and that in consequence of 
his deliverance the Franks were baptized and received into 
the Catholic Church. It would also appear that the princes 
and kings became convinced, as they readily might, that 
the Christian religion was better adapted than heathenism 
to promote social and moral well-being, and that they 
therefore judged it to fall within their duty as well as their 
rights to decree the conversion of their subjects in the 
mass. On the other hand, the natural tendency to con- 
servatism in religion, which found very determined expres- 
sion among the later Northmen, would doubtless have made 
the change impossible if the new religion had not impressed 
the peoples with manifest evidences of its intrinsic superi- 
ority, and also found points of contact in the best elements 
and aspirations of their pagan past. The Catholic Church 
must have touched the imagination as the symbol and 
guardian of the higher civilisation which looked down upon 
them from the Graeco-Roman world, while its noble fabrics, 
its solemn pageants, and its imposing ritual must have 
been felt to body forth somewhat of the majesty, the 
splendour, and the repose of a heavenly world. Above all, 
there were features of their paganism which had prepared 
them to welcome the new faith. The doctrine of the 
supreme God, after whom they had groped, was brought 
near to them in an imclouded glory of infinite power, 



RELIGION 351 

wisdom, and goodness. The racial genius that created the 
character and the tragedy of Balder had a real capacity of 
understanding the crucified Christ. " From of old/' says 
Treitschke, '' the Germans felt a deep yearning for deliver- 
ance from the curse of sin. They alone of all the peoples 
of Europe had in their heathen days a foreboding of the 
doom of this wicked generation, and of a new world of purity 
and light which was to be. In such a people the joyful 
message from Jerusalem found hearts prepared for it, and 
how reverently and devotedly they received the new faith 
is told in the marvellous structures of their old cathedrals.'' ^ 



B. Germany and the Reformation 

The Middle Ages, extending from about the end of the 
fifth century of our era to the beginning of the sixteenth, 
occupied the middle space between the glory and the strength 
of Classical Antiquity which had passed away, and the greater 
achievements of the Modem Age which was to be. It is not, 
however, to be supposed that the interval was sheer loss, 
and a waste of the world's time. Medieval Europe had a 
greatness and a striking glamour of its own ; and the 
special significance of the thousand years was that it was 
the stage at which the youthful and gifted peoples which 
had made so tumultuous an entrance upon the scene were 
placed at school in order to be educated and disciplined for 
their future career. The political event which marked 
the close of the age of Antiquity was the fall of the Roman 
Empire of the West before the Teutonic migrations, and 
the following centuries witnessed the gradual consolidation 
of populations into the nationalities which were to contend 
for the hegemony of modern Europe, and to map out 
colonies and dependencies in every other continent of the 
globe. 

The scope of the education was that the new peoples 

^ Luther und die deutsche Nation, 



852 GERMAN CULTURE 

were set to assimilate elements of the civilisation which had 
been transmitted from the old world in law, custom and 
literature, and not least that they were grounded in the 
Christian faith, leavened by the ethical teaching of the 
Scriptures, and made to suffer in penances and excommuni- 
cations for wrong-doing and contimiacy. The chief features 
of medieval history were entirely appropriate to the school- 
days of the nations. The members freely wrangled and 
fought among themselves ; they banded themselves to- 
gether in the Crusades for a trial of strength with the hated 
rival school of Islam ; and they had a prolonged feud with 
the authorities in the form of the conflict between the 
Emperor and the Pope. But as yet the quarrel with the 
Church only concerned temporal affairs and poHtical rights : 
the mandates of the master were accepted without question 
in respect of the matter and methods of the teaching ; 
and the prescribed tasks were worked out by the gifted 
pupils with extraordinary assiduity in the doctrines and 
dialectics of the Scholastic theology. At the close of the 
era, the schooling had so far served its purpose that the estate 
of tutelage was outgrown ; and the nations gave evidence 
of their maturity in the Renaissance movement and in the 
upheaval of the Reformation — which latter, in view of its 
far-reaching effects in the intellectual poUtical and social 
as well as in the religious spheres, has been generally re- 
garded as marking the transition to the new and more 
brilliant era of Modern Times. 

The Reformation is accounted for in average Protestant 
thought as a victory of truth, which was prepared for by 
the new learning, which followed upon the recovery of the 
Scriptures, and which was inspired and directed by the 
Spirit of Truth. The German interpretation lays the utmost 
stress on the contribution of criticism and insight which was 
made by the peculiar character and genius of the Teutonic 
race. The third and great epoch in the development of 
Christianity is described as that in which, after having been 
intellectualised bj^ the Greeks and externalised by the 



RELIGION 853 

Latins, it passed into the wiser and safer custody of the 
Germanic mind. Fichte speaks of the Reformation as the 
latest consummate achievement to date of the German 
people — " in a sense its perfect act of world-wide signific- 
ance/' 1 It originated in the soul of Luther, and was rooted 
in his life-work, and Luther, we are told, was a uniquely 
representative man — the incarnation and compendium of 
all German qualities and traits that command respect or 
inspire affection. '' A foreigner may well ask in bewilder- 
ment,'' says Treitschke, "how such strongly contrasted 
characteristics could be combined in a single personality — 
the energy of destroying wrath and the inwardness of devout 
faith, sublime wisdom and childlike simplicity, so much 
deep-hearted mysticism and so much of the joy of living, 
such untutored roughness and such tenderness of heart, 
the pride that emboldened him to write himself ' evangelist 
by the grace of God,' and the humility which flung him in 
the dust crushed in spirit before his God. We Germans see 
no enigma ; we simply say, ' That is blood of our blood.' "2 
The Reformation was primarily a revolt against the religious 
theory and the moral defects of the medieval Church, and 
this revolt involved a repudiation of the authority of the 
official organs of the institution, with the affirmation of the 
autonomy of the individual mind and judgment. As 
regards both its negative and positive aspects, it is said, the 
spiritual revolution had its spring in the religious depth and 
moral earnestness of the German type of character, and 
not least in the spirit of liberty which from of old has been 
the breath of life to the soul which utters itself in Teutonic 
speech. The subject is of so much intrinsic interest 
that it is worth while reproducing the argument in more 
detail. 

I. The mainspring of the Reformation movement was 
a spiritual interest. It raised anew the fundamental re- 
ligious issue, — What must a man be or do to reach a right 

^ Die vollendete Weltthat, Reden an die deutsche Nation, 
^ Luther und die detitsche Nation, 



854 



GERMAN CULTURE 



relation with God, and enjoy enduring peace and security ? 
The medieval Church had elaborated a scheme of salvation 
which made the individual dependent at every point on 
the mediatorial offices of the divine institution. He was 
quickened, energised, and built up by the grace which it 
infused through the channels of the seven sacraments, and 
he was directed to offer satisfaction in penances, and to 
accimiulate merit by works of supererogation; but when 
all was done the sensitive and earnest soul was left without 
any firm assurance that it had found the way of escape 
from sin and its penalties. In opposition to this scheme, 
Luther proclaimed the Gospel which had as its watchword 
Justification by Faith. This doctrine meant that the soul 
has direct access to God, and dispenses with all priestly 
mediation save that of the God-man, who died for our sins 
and ever liveth to make intercession for us, while the 
sovereign blessings of acceptance and forgiveness are vouch- 
safed because of the condition of the heart, and may be 
claimed in childlike trust from the divine mercy as a 
gratuitous boon. The moral energy of the Gospel was 
given in the fact that saving faith involved a radical change 
of character naturally unfolding into a life whose strength 
was the virtues and its beauty the Christlike graces. The 
sum of the matter, as put by Luther in his treatise 0} 
Christian Liberty, is that a Christian is made to be free 
by faith from every yoke, but only to the end that, enslaved 
by love, he may become the servant of all. With this 
scheme of evangelical Christianity, it is said, the German 
spirit has an instinctive affinity. The mass of the nation 
was spiritual enough in the sixteenth century to find the 
deep religious theory to be intelligible, and also to be 
more attractive than all the competing interests of trade 
and politics. It was the gospel for which burdened German 
souls had yearned and agonised throughout the spiritual 
night of the Middle Ages. In later times, it is added, the 
German mind has clung to the elements, and preserved the 
spirit of the evangelical creed, even when it has discarded 



RELIGION 855 

much of the original apparatus of evangeUcal doctrine. In 
the greatest philosophical systems it continued to be recog- 
nised that the fundamental problem is that of the relation 
of the soul to its God, and that the act which saves — how- 
ever much or little may be understood by salvation — is the 
venture of faith. It may also be thought significant that 
the most radical theological schools of Germany glory in 
the name of evangelical, and hold that they are fully 
entitled to it inasmuch as, like Luther, they make no claim 
of human merit, but magnify the grace of God, and count 
it to be the greatest thing in the world to have the filial 
consciousness of a child of God. 

2. The medieval Church, it is said, also came into collision 
with the German conscience. The immediate occasion of 
the Reformation was the traffic in indulgences, which, 
though capable of a more respectable scholastic explanation, 
were popularly understood to offer a permit, in considera- 
tion of a money-payment, for a life of sinful license. The 
burgesses resented the cupidity of the Church in the matter 
of tithes, and to a wretched peasantry it seemed the worst 
representative of the classes that lived in idleness and 
luxiu-y, and ground the faces of the poor. Hypocrisy, 
it is also said, was never a German vice ; and when it 
appeared in the light of the Scriptures that much of the 
doctrines and rites of the Church was human invention, the 
Italian way of disbelieving and sneeringly conforming was 
impossible for German candour. It might be done roughly 
and even brutally, but the German was forced to utter all 
his mind. It was also revolting to the German sense of 
justice to inflict upon a man the supreme penalty of the law 
for doing a thing so natural and inevitable for a German as 
making use of his intellect. '* To burn a heretic,'' said 
Luther, *' be he ever so wicked, is contrary to justice and 
God. Heretics are to be overcome, not with fire but with 
writings, as the ancient Fathers did." ^ 

The ethical revolt against the Roman Catholic system 

^ An den christ lichen A del deutscher Nation* 



356 GERMAN CULTURE 

is further explained by observing that the medieval Church 
paid homage to an ideal of human perfection in which the 
German mind had never really believed. It had a very 
vivid vision of the world to come, and a deep aspiration 
after heavenly perfection and bliss, but it also found this 
earth very good as a place of rich experience, of solid work, 
of daring adventure, and of noble achievements. It was 
therefore predisposed to reject the ascetic ideal — with its 
preference for the contemplative life, and its glorification 
of poverty and celibacy — as an utterly inadequate concep- 
tion of the chief good for man. German writers declare it 
to have been no private opinion of Luther, but the expres- 
sion of an ingrained conviction of his race, when he pro- 
claimed that there is no higher service of God than that 
which is rendered in the fear of God within the natural 
spheres of the home and the calling, and that the worship- 
ping and beneficent Church is only a domain of the far- 
branching Kingdom of God, which has its other officers in 
kings and princes, and all others who exercise authority 
under them. 

3. In contending for a better gospel and a fuller moral 
ideal, the Reformers inevitably raised another issue which 
may be deemed of still greater moment, and which had at 
least more varied and more far-reaching consequences. The 
question thus stirred was whether the spirit of liberty which 
is said to be native to the German soul, which demands 
freedom in the many forms of that " noble thing," and 
most of all in the region of mind and conscience, was to be 
held in subjection by an external and despotic authority. 
For Luther the issue was, — Could he, the individual member 
of the body of Christ, claim the right of private judgment, 
or must he submit against his better knowledge to the 
authority of the Papal hierarchy ? His answer was given 
in the famous Leipzig declaration : 

*' I believe that I am a Christian theologian, and Hve in 
the Kingdom of the truth ; and therefore I will be free and 
will yield to no authority, whether it be of a Council or of 



RELIGION 857 

the Emperor, or of the universities or of the Pope, so that I 
may confidently confess all that I know as truth, whether 
it is asserted by a Catholic or a heretic, and whether it is 
accepted or rejected by a Council. Why shall I not venture 
the attempt if I, one man, can point to a better authority 
than a Council ? " 

The claim of liberty, as made by Luther, was, of course, 
severely limited in its scope. He appealed from the 
authority of the Church to the authority of Scripture, and 
he admitted no right to seek another seat of authority, or 
to dispense altogether with such external support or check. 
But in asserting the right of the individual to break with 
authority, and also to be the interpreter of the authority 
which he acknowledged, he took a step which inevitably 
issued in th^ claim of the human mind to a liberty of far 
vaster sweep. It logically led to the complete emancipa- 
tion of philosophy and science from the control and embargo 
of the Church, and to the freedom of individual thought and 
speech which is the accepted privilege of the modem 
civilised world. 

The explanation of the Protestant Reformation as a 
characteristic expression of the German spirit is supported 
by certain obvious facts. The Reformation originated in 
two Teutonic centres — one a principality in the heart of 
Germany, the other a Swiss Canton which was an outpost 
of German stock and speech. And it only needs a glance 
at the map of Europe to show that the racial character must 
have been an influential factor in procuring acceptance for 
the principles and the ideals of the Protestant form of 
Christianity. The Protestant area is roughly co-extensive 
with the territory which was settled or conquered by 
tribes — High German, Low German, and Scandinavian — 
which have been conjoined on linguistic and other grounds 
as forming a distinct branch of the Aryan family. In France, 
Italy, and Spain the deposit from the Teutonic migrations 
was relatively small, and in the Latin countries Protes- 
tantism has, on the whole, been a languishing cause. On 



358 GERMAN CULTURE 

the other hand, the German claim is subject to con^ 
siderable deductions or quaUfications. To begin with, the 
Reformation was not the masterpiece of a rehgious genius 
which struck in with creative energy : at the most it evi- 
denced German receptivity for subUme ideas which had 
long before been put in circulation as the gospel most pro- 
foundly adapted to the needs of sinful and mortal men. The 
scheme of evangelical thought was expounded by Augustine 
and other fathers of the Western Church, while the 
doctrine of Justification by Faith and the ethical principles 
of Protestantism had both a still older source in the writings 
of St. Paul, who was by birth a Jew and by grace the disciple 
of Jesus Christ. Further, on a closer examination of the 
facts, we make the curious observation that the German 
people, as a whole, has been less responsive to the Refor- 
mation than the population of Great Britain. Roman 
Catholicism has more than held its own in Southern and 
Western Germany and in German Austria, while England 
and Scotland became sturdily and almost soUdly Protestant, 
and this in spite of the fact that they contained a large and 
powerful Celtic body in the populations of Wales and the 
Scottish Highlands. It is undeniable that the Teutonic 
strain must have had much to do with Protestantism, but 
it would appear from these facts that it was most effective 
for the purpose when it had assimilated neither too large 
nor too small a proportion of diverse racial elements. Of the 
qualities which are specified as making the German people 
naturally Protestant, there is at least one which has existed 
in greater strength in those regions in which the " Teutonic 
stuff was at the most the prepotent factor in national 
character. It must be left to the Searcher of hearts to judge 
of the prevalence of true religion and pure morality, but the 
love of liberty, which was one of the main roots of the Re- 
formation, lies well open to human observation ; and whether 
we have regard to political history and the struggle for self- 
governing liberties, or to the individuaUsm which demands 
not only the right of private judgment but also the fullest 



RELIGION 359 

elbow-room for the management of one's life, it does not 
appear doubtful that its chosen embodiment has rather 
been the Anglo-Saxon stock, and the new American race 
which has so largely reproduced the idiosyncrasies of the 
Anglo-Saxon type of character and civilisation. 

Almost from the beginning Protestant Christianity was 
broken up into the two divisions of Lutheranism and the 
Reformed Church narrowly so-called. The Lutheran form 
had little success in propagating itself beyond the borders 
of Germany and the Scandinavian countries. Holland, 
Britain, and America have, on the whole, preferred a 
different type of doctrine or of ecclesiastical polity. The 
reason of the breach of the main body of the " Reformed *' 
with Lutheranism was that it was too conservative — that 
it compromised with Roman error in its doctrine of the 
Eucharist, and generally was too timid about making a 
clean sweep of traditional ideas and practices which had no 
clear Scriptural warrant — and perhaps, also, that it came 
to give an uncertain sound as to the doctrines of divine 
sovereignty and election, which were felt by persecuted 
minorities to be of vital moment in the struggle against the 
almost overwhelming power and craft of the realm of dark- 
ness. Butler laid his finger in the caricaturist's own way 
on the more radical spirit of the Reformed, who seemed to 
him to think and act 

" As if religion were intended 
For nothing else but to be mended." 

For the same reason it might have been expected that a 
friendly alliance would have been established between 
Lutheranism and the Anglican Church, as the latter has 
also stood for a via media and a strong deference to eccle- 
siastical traditions, while it possesses in its Thirty-Nine 
Articles a symbol which has close affinities with the testi- 
mony of the Augsburg Confession. As a fact, the early 
relations of the Lutheran and Anglican Churches were 
governed by a conviction of the essential unity of the 



360 GERMAN CULTURE 

Churches of the Reformation. In the later period complete 
estrangement has taken place. Lutheranism, in its repre- 
sentative voices, failed to maintain the reverence for tra- 
dition which moves the Anglo-Catholic mind to attach the 
note of infallibility to the decisions of the undivided Church 
of the early centuries. Barriers were also created by the 
ecclesiastical principles of the Lutheran Church, as it not 
only asserted the priesthood of the laity, but took the 
principle very seriously, treated the issue between Epis- 
copacy and Presbyterianism as one to be settled in the light 
of experience and expediency, and held that it is only 
purity of teaching and Scriptural dispensation of the 
Sacraments, not external incidents like apostolic succes- 
sion, which are relevant in determining the claim of a Church 
to rank as a true branch of the Church of Christ. 

The sixteenth century, with its evangelical faith and 
experience, its assertion of spiritual liberty, its heroism, 
and its Martin Luther, was the golden age of German re- 
ligion. It was followed by an age of bronze, if not of iron. 
In the seventeenth century the Lutheran Church exhibited 
some of the characteristics of the English Puritan move- 
ment, but it had more in common with the doctrinal hair- 
splitting and the pedantry of the Puritans, than with their 
religious and moral inspiration. The period is known in 
Lutheran history as the age of Protestant Scholasticism. 
The German mind was then applied, with its characteristic 
laboriousness and thoroughness, to elaborate and defend 
the details of a doctrinal system based on the tenets of 
Luther and the " Form of Concord '* which was supposed 
to have the character of finality. The systems built up 
by these theologians are truly monumental in their kind, 
but they count for little to-day — save with the conscientious 
specialist — ^in comparison with the sacred songs in which the 
living piety of the time gave thanks for the river of grace 
which still continued to make glad the City of God. 

The age of minute analysis and militant dogmatism was 
followed by the disintegration of Lutheran orthodoxy. 



RELIGION 861 

Two factors contributed to the decay. A reaction began, 
in the school of Spener, known as Pietism, which shifted 
the emphasis from orthodoxy to personal holiness, and was 
content with the simpler type of Biblical doctrine that was 
involved in, and which made for, the experiences of con- 
version and sanctification. To Pietism succeeded a 
Rationalism which threatened to reduce to ruins the im- 
posing ecclesiastical and theological fabric which had been 
reared on the foundations of the Reformation. The same 
movement had made much stir from an earlier date in 
England imder the name of Deism — a type of popular 
philosophy which proposed by an appeal to common sense 
and universal assent to get rid of the supernatural doctrines 
of Christianity. The Church of England opposed the drift 
with a powerful Apologetic that has its classic monuments 
in Butler's Analogy and Paley's Christian Evidences, but in 
Germany the new school of thought invaded and largely 
captured the Chiu*ch, and admittedly cast a blight over its 
whole intellectual and spiritual life. The most popular 
handbook of doctrine was the Institutiones of Wegscheider. 
This prosaic theologian reduced the Christian doctrines to 
the articles of God, Immortality and Duty, and is related 
to have passed a motion in his University Seminary, with 
one dissentient voice, in favour of the explicit adoption of 
a new religion. The pulpit was used for the dissemination 
of scientific ideas, and of technical information useful to 
peasants and tradesmen, and it could even be thought 
appropriate to discourse on Christmas Day upon the best 
fodder for stalled beasts, and on Easter Sunday on the ad- 
vantages of early rising. Schleiermacher relates that the 
educated had turned from religion with contempt or in- 
difference, that the women had been unfaithful to the vocation 
of their sex by laying aside even the profession of piety, and 
that it only lingered on, after the fashion of an antiquated 
mode of dress, in the more secluded districts and among the 
more backward sections of the population. No doubt there 
was a very considerable remnant which kept alive the 



:|iii 



862 GERMAN CULTURE 

orthodox or pietistic tradition, but on a general view there 
was left a deep impression of the exhaustion of faith and of 
the bankruptcy of spiritual life. 



C. The Modern Period 

In the nineteenth century the Lutheran Church once 
more asserted itself as a powerful force in the realm of 
religion. It is largely because of its contribution that the 
century may be described as on the whole the most im- 
pressive, in an intellectual point of view, in the whole history 
of the Christian Church, while it also displayed notable zeal 
in the inspiration and guidance of philanthropic and mis- 
sionary enterprises. 

I. MODERN GERMAN THEOLOGY 

The preliminary condition of the great modern develop- 
ment of Lutheran theology, as well as of the missionary 
zeal and the works of mercy, was a renewal and deepening 
of the spiritual hfe of the people. The Wesleyan Revival 
in England had its counterpart in a religious awakening of 
Germany, which was greatly intensified amid the struggles 
and sacrifices of the Napoleonic wars. The new and deeper 
experiences made divine things once more seem to be pre- 
eminently worthy of the concentrated attention and the 
strenuous labour of the human mind, while the revival also 
generated moral energies which sought an outlet in manifold 
forms of Christlike service. A second factor of the situa- 
tion was the ability of Germany to produce men who could 
bring to the tasks of the investigator an astounding patience 
and thoroughness, and who in some cases combined this 
extraordinary capacity for work with the power of sweep- 
ing generalisation, penetrating criticism, and speculative 
audacity. The third favourable condition was that the 
scholars and thinkers were allowed and even encouraged 
to cultivate theology under conditions of almost untram- 



RELIGION 363 

melled freedom. The Lutheran clergy are, on the whole, 
subject to the same confessional obligations as in the 
National Churches of England and Scotland ; but the pro- 
fessional theologians, by whom most of the research and 
speculation was done, were commonly accorded the fullest 
liberty consonant with a profession of loyalty to Protestant 
or Evangehcal principles as understood in the most Uberal 
sense. It is, of course, easy to give good reasons for a 
different arrangement : the Church, like every other society, 
naturally desires to uphold its convictions and safeguard 
its usefulness ; and it is not surprising that it should desire 
guarantees that those who instruct its teachers will fully 
share its faith, and will refrain from tampering with doc- 
trines which it believes to be the sources of its strength. 
But it is at least evident that it was because the Lutheran 
Church took the risks attendant on a larger freedom that 
it has produced a literature which has fearlessly explored 
and worked over every field of theological interest, and 
which has placed before Christendom almost every possible 
phase of truth and error, whether historical or doctrinal, 
along with the materials for forming a judgment on the 
bearings and merits of every traditional or novel position. 

The contributions of Germany in the modem period to 
reUgious knowledge, theory, and doctrine fall under three 
main heads : 

(i) The discussion of the nature and validity of religion by 
a succession of philosophical thinkers of the first 
rank in connection with their general view of the 
nature of reality and the meaning of the universe. 

(2) The historical labours in the field of Biblical Science, 

and in the various departments of Ecclesiastical 
History. 

(3) The attempts to find a new basis or method for the 

system of Christian Doctrine, and to reconsider 
and restate in accordance therewith the particular 
doctrines of Christianity. 



364 GERMAN CULTURE 

I. The treatment of religion by modern German philo- 
sophers is of capital interest, as some took theology under 
their, patronage and tutelage, while others laboured to destroy 
it, and even to discredit the religious view of the world. 
Whether it be a symptom of the religious instincts of the 
German nature, or of its intellectual thoroughness, or of 
the self-consciousness which makes a thinker feel that he 
is expected to settle accounts with everything that is called 
great, practically every commanding figure in the philo- 
sophical succession deemed it incimibent on him, if not to 
constitute himself the apologist of Christianity, at least to 
explain why he rejected it, and what he proposed as a 
substitute. When faith failed, it was felt impossible to dis- 
believe and be silent, and when unbelief passed into hatred, 
it had to make its attitude and its reasons abundantly 
and even brutally plain. It is, however, rightly claimed 
that no thinker of the first rank conducted his attack in 
the spirit and the manner of Voltaire. When modem 
German philosophy first entered the religious sphere, it 
cast its shield over the Christian faith. The precedent was 
set by Kant, who in the spirit of a profounder reason sought to 
vindicate Christianity against the attacks that had been made 
upon it by the so-called Vulgar Rationalism. His position 
was that the dogmas of the deistic creed were not supported 
by cogent arguments — in fact, required to be helped out by 
faith, and on the other hand that the pecuhar doctrines of 
Christianity, which had been rejected as products of super- 
stition and unreason, could be shown to embody deep and 
important truths touching the chief end of man, his rela- 
tion to God, and the conditions of his realising his spiritual 
destiny. Hegel included in his all-embracing system a 
Philosophy of Religion in which he claimed for Christianity 
the character of the absolute or perfect religion ; and he con- 
tended that the doctrines which were accepted on authority 
as above reason, or rejected by criticism as contrary to 
reason, were really expressions, cast in peculiar modes of 
thought and speech, of his own views as to the revelation 



RELIGION 365 

of the Infinite in the finite, and of the destination of man to 
find God and himself in conscious union with God. Hegel's 
Philosophy of History also enunciated a fruitful principle 
of conciliation. If, as he taught, the real has always a 
soul of rationality, if everything of moment which has 
come to be, and has proved itself able to endure, has rested 
upon some solid ground in the nature and scheme of things, 
it speaks for ignorance and prejudice rather than insight 
to take up a merely critical or negative attitude towards 
a historical fact of the magnitude of the Christian Church 
and its system of thought. In the later discussion doubts 
began to prevail as to the identity of HegeUan thought 
with the substance of the doctrines of historical Chris- 
tianity. Strauss denounced the reconciliation as hypo- 
critical, and declared that even after a short experience 
philosophical lions had had enough of attempting to 
eat straw like the ox. The same doubts were expressed 
with equal emphasis from the side of Lutheran orthodoxy. 
But, on the whole, Hegelianism has rendered a service 
similar to that which was rendered by the School of 
Alexandria in the ancient world ; and it is because of its 
contribution, as developed on lines made familiar among 
ourselves by Green and the Cairds, that many who claim 
the full intellectual inheritance of the modem world have 
continued to feel themselves one in spirit and conviction 
with the main body of the Christian society. 

During the last two generations Germany has been 
largely dominated by philosophical influences of a different 
spirit and tendency. Schopenhauer succeeded for a time 
to a position only less commanding than that of Hegel, and 
his fundamental ideas admitted of no compromise with the 
Christian view of the world and human life. He conceived 
of the ground of things as being, not a rational principle — 
much less a personal God — but a blind will which is driven 
on by an insatiable lust of unmeaning production ; and 
consistently with this he estimated the existence of sentient 
creatures, and the Ufe and striving of mankind, as un- 



866 GERMAN CULTURE 

qualified and possibly irremediable evils. It is an illustra- 
tion of the paradox of the Gernian character that, during 
the twenty years when the people was rejoicing in the 
triumphs which resuscitated its Empire and consolidated 
its life, and when it was applying itself with marvellous 
energy and success to the development of its technical skill 
and its material prosperity, its higher intellect should have 
been fascinated and considerably dominated by a philosopher 
who summed up all in '* Vanity of Vanities." The pessi- 
mistic mood could not continue, and during the last genera- 
tion two different types of anti-Christian thought have 
made a stronger impression on the general mind. One is 
the monistic philosophy with a materialistic bias which 
Haeckel has laboured to represent as the view of existence 
that is inseparably bound up with the methods and achieve- 
ments of modem science. The other is the scheme of 
thought which underlies the brilliant ^but somewhat in- 
coherent writings of Nietzsche. His standpoint may be 
summarily described by saying that he was an Agnostic 
who knew and cared nothing about transcendental realities, 
a Positivist who found the given world a sufficient reality, 
an Optimist who foimd the world very good though capable 
of becoming much better, and a Reformer who proposed to 
abolish the Christian idea of God as a nightmare, and the 
Christian morality as the chief obstacle to sane and cour- 
ageous human progress. It may be added that, amid all 
the intellectual and moral vices of Nietzsche's system there 
shines forth a sincerity which would have been more than 
respectable if it had been allowed freer play by his un- 
speakable vanity. At the same time earnest and strenuous 
efforts were of course made by the representatives of older 
schools of thought to steady the German mind in safer 
paths. The philosophical shallowness of Materialism was 
exposed by thinkers like Paulsen, who stood for a spiritual 
conception of the ultimate reality, while Lotze did strenuous 
and original thinking in support of a conception of existence 
within which Christian faith can live amd breathe and move. 



RELIGION 867 

2. We pass to the work of the theologians proper, whose 
standpoint differed from that of the philosophers in that 
they operated with the assumption — however diversely they 
might construe it — of a Christian revelation, and also in that 
they acknowledged an obligation to be serviceable to the 
Ufe and labour of the Church. What first comes into view 
is their imposing work in the domain of Historical Theology, 
with its two main subdivisions of Biblical Science and 
Ecclesiastical History. 

(a) The field of Biblical Science has been cultivated by 
German scholars with extraordinary assiduity. Every de- 
partment of study has been enriched by their labours, and 
some of the important " disciplines " may be said to have 
been created by them. English scholarship independently 
devoted itself, with the most brilliant success, to the culti- 
vation of two parts of the field — namely, the criticism of 
the text and the interpretation of the sacred writings in 
detailed commentaries. But whether it was that the 
Church in Britain had too severely limited the range of free 
inquiry, or that a conservative bias disposed to acquiescence 
in traditional views, it was left to the Lutheran Church to 
grapple with the fundamental literary problems, and to 
lead the discussion of the weightier issues. These problems 
and issues are specially bound up with the three great 
branches of modern Biblical Science known as Special 
Introduction or the Higher Criticism, Biblical History, and 
Biblical Theology. 

The task of the Higher Criticism is to place in their 
historical setting the different books of the Bible, and to 
determine their date, authorship, destination and scope. 
The Church had inherited a traditional account of the age and 
authorship of the canonical books which the old Protestant 
theology accepted as on the whole reliable. Lutheran Scholar- 
ship undertook to re-examine the traditional views in the 
light of all available evidence, external and internal, and to 
test every other possible, and also every other impossible, 
hypothesis. In the domain of the Old Testament Uterature 



368 GERMAN CULTURE 

the investigation was left almost entirely in their hands, 
except that at an advanced stage they were joined by 
Kuenen, Robertson Smith, Cheyne, Driver, and other 
collaborators. The outcome of the labour of well nigh a 
century is that a new view of the origin and sequence of 
the Old Testament literature has been elaborated which, 
subject to some differences in detail, has become the working 
theory of the great body of scholars throughout the world. 
The critical examination of the genesis of the New Testa- 
ment literature had begun earlier, and provoked even greater 
turmoil and more embittered conflict. The epoch-making 
event was the promulgation by F. C. Baur of the famous 
Tiibingen theory, which was founded on the idea that 
Christianity, after receiving its original impulse from Jesus, 
passed through a period of internal dissension, and finally 
reached a basis of compromise and reconciUation in the 
arrangements of the old Catholic Church. The New Testa- 
ment was supposed to be a collection of writings extending 
over a century, which represented the different stages in 
the quarrel between Jewish and Gentile Christianity, and 
also the advainces gradually made from each side towards a 
settlement. The theory is no longer maintained in its 
entirety by any body of scholarly opinion. Its abandon- 
ment was partly due to the learned and sensible criticism of 
a group of English scholars, but it was also contributed to 
by the labours of those who had called Baur master, and the 
event counts as evidence that in the long-run the theorising 
German mind makes acknowledgment of the pressure of 
facts. In the field of New Testament criticism a strong 
conservative reaction has taken place, and only isolated 
positions of the Tiibingen School are still defended — such as 
the denial of the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel, 
and of the authenticity of certain minor Epistles. It would, 
however, be extremely foolish to sum up the story as un- 
necessary labour which has nothing more to show for its 
reward than the triumph of good sense over gratuitous 
and unsubstantial German hypotheses. The scholar's know- 



RELIGION 369 

ledge of the New Testament, as the result of the investiga- 
tions, is vastly deeper and richer than it was at the beginning 
of the controversies. There are also positive results of 
great interest and value. The extremely intricate Synoptic 
problem, for example, which has to do with the origin of the 
first three Gospels, has been almost solved by the infinite 
patience and ingenuity which have been brought to bear, 
and scholarship has come within sight of an agreement as 
to the sources from which they drew, the order of their 
composition, and the nature of their interdependence. 

While Biblical Criticism has its independent interest, it is 
chiefly important as a preliminary to the work of the 
historian. For the great monographs of Biblical History the 
Church has mainly been indebted to the Lutheran Church. 
Ewald's History of Israel, though written from a critical 
standpoint which is now regarded as obsolete, still towers 
above the field in massive grandeur. How the history 
unfolds on the basis of the later types of critical view may 
be learned from the pages of Wellhausen, Stade, and Kittel. 
Passing to New Testament history, we find the outstanding 
fact to be the extraordinary amount of labour which was 
devoted during more than a century to the examination 
of the records of the life of Christ. At this point, more than 
at any other, it has been difficult to arrive at a satisfactory 
understanding as between the demands of science and the 
rights of faith. To English theology it long seemed that 
the only task left over to the Church by the Evangelists was 
to construct a harmony of the Gospel narratives, and to 
add to this devotional and practical applications such as 
make up the staple of Jeremy Taylor's Life of our Lord, 
In Germany the Life of Christ has been written under the 
influence of every variety of a Christian or philosophical 
creed. The pantheistic standpoint was occupied by Strauss, 
who made the assumption that miracles are impossible, and 
went on to explain the miraculous narratives of the Gospels 
as mythical growths. The theist who is sceptical about 
nature-miracles, but willing to beUeve in spiritual marvels, 

2 A 



370 GERMAN CULTURE 

including miracles of healing, finds the materials worked 
over in this interest with inmiense erudition and graphic 
power in Keim's Jesus of Nazara. The task was carried 
out in the fullest sympathy with the positive Lutheran 
creed by Neander, and more recently by Bernhard Weiss, 
whose Life of Jesus combines a supernatural faith with an 
unrivalled knowledge of the Sy optic problem, and utilises 
the critical results in the treatment of the details of the 
Gospel story. Notwithstanding the astounding labour and 
ingenuity that were brought to bear in a century of work 
on the literary materials, recent writers, like J. Weiss, have 
found it possible to propound some novel theses.^ It may 
be felt that much of this labour upon the great theme had 
better have been left unattempted, and that hands have 
been laid upon the holy person of Jesus which were not fit 
to touch the hem of His garment. On the other hand, it is 
evident that the untiring research and speculation form an 
extraordinary tribute to the unique greatness and the in- 
vincible spell of Christ, and also that faith in the historical 
Christ is a thing of greater value when its grounds have been 
mercilessly tested, and it has emerged with a good con- 
science from the ordeal. It may be added that the 
German work on St. Paul and the Apostolic Age has not 
been marked by the same distinction, or achieved the 
same celebrity, as the attempts to re-edit the matter of the 
Gospels. 

Biblical Theology is, perhaps, the most valuable of the 
Lutheran gifts to the wider Church. It was founded on the 
reasonable idea that it is desirable for the interpreter of 
Scripture to put aside all doctrinal bias, and to expound 
the teaching in sole reliance upon the ordinary linguistic 
and historical methods. It also seemed wise not to treat 
the Bible as if it were all of a piece — as had been done by 
the dogmatic theologians — but to regard it as the record of 
a progressive series of religious and ethical ideas, and to 
make a separate study of the contents of particular books 

^ Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 



RELIGION 371 

or groups of books. The theology of the Old Testament 
has been exhaustively set forth in monographs which are 
governed by the different phases of opinion about the 
literary sources — the traditional critical views being assumed 
by Oehler, while those of the now dominant critical school 
are presupposed in the valuable treatise of H- Schultz. 
The different types of New Testament Theology have been 
handled with even greater thoroughness. Weiss is probably 
the most successful in maintaining the ideal of impartiality 
and exhaustiveness in his Biblical Theology of the New 
Testament, The abler and more trenchant volumes of 
Holtzmann are injuriously affected by his negative bias, 
while Beyschlag's attractive New Testament Theology exagge- 
rates the contrast between the Biblical teaching and the later 
standards of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Mention should also 
be made of certain outstanding studies of individual types 
of New Testament doctrine — notably Wendt's Teaching of 
Jesus and Pfleiderer's Paulinism. 

(b) In ecclesiastical history the German contributions have 
been marked by the same laboriousness and massiveness, 
and also by the same profession of freedom from dogmatic 
prejudice. Although there are various histories of the 
Church which cover the whole ground, no historian has 
brought to the task the comprehensive grasp, the dramatic 
instinct, and the narrative and descriptive power which, in 
addition to industry and convictions, are needed for doing 
justice to the story which is so strangely compounded of 
magnificent triimiph and pathetic failure. The History of 
Doctrine, to name only one of the departments, has been 
enriched by masterly and brilliant monographs from Baur 
and Hamack. It is another question whether it is as easy 
to compass impartial historical treatment in this field as 
to make the profession of it. If the great Anglicans carried 
an apologetic bias into the field of Patristic Theology, and 
were unable to recognise palpable heresy in the writings of 
an ante-Nicene Father, Harnack is hardly less obsessed by 
the idea that the Hellenic mind had too httle in common 




372 GERMAN CULTURE 

with the German mind to appreciate the Gospel, and that 
the Greek fathers, by reason of their limitations, largely 
corrupted the Gospel into an inferior Metaphysic. m\ 

3. Remarkable as has been the work of the German 
mind in the historical fields of Theology, it has made 
another theological contribution which is even more dis- 
tinctive. Alongside of the untiring research, there pro- 
ceeded attempts to find a new basis for doctrine, and to 
re-edit more or less drastically the doctrinal material trans- 
mitted in the Creeds and Confessions. To this doctrinal 
activity there is no parallel in the work of the other great 
Churches. From the Roman CathoUc standpoint, the 
question of the revision and statement of doctrine cannot 
arise, nor does such a task fall within the purview of Anglo- 
Catholic Theology. The so-called Broad Church School, as 
known in England and Scotland, on the whole thought it 
sufficient to ignore uncongenial aspects of the traditional 
theology, or to suggest modifications of isolated tenets ; 
and it never grappled fully with fundamental principles, or 
faced the task of applying them in a revised and complete 
scheme of Christian doctrine. The theological mind of Ger- 
many had a passion for first principles and a talent for 
systematic completeness ; and it produced a striking series 
of systems which rest on varying conceptions of the source 
of Christian doctrine and of the essence of Christianity. 
We can only touch here on this dogmatic contribution and 
must refer without discussion to the profound and elaborate 
treatment of Christian Ethics — the second main division 
of Systematic Theology — by a great succession which in- 
cludes the names of Rothe, Dorner, and Herrmann. 

The most original doctrinal contribution was made by 
Schleiermacher. At the close of the eighteenth century, it 
seemed to him that theology had fallen on evil days. It could 
not be built up out of the decisions of the Infallible Church, as 
this authority was discredited. Nor could reliance any longer 
be placed, after the old Protestant fashion, on the Infallible 



RELIGION 873 

Book. The rationalistic way, moreover, of falling back on 
common sense for a few simple ideas about God and duty 
seemed to him to sin against piety by depriving it of the 
Christ who had been the perennial spring of the life and power 
of the Church. His new proposal was to extract a scientific 
theology from Christian experience. Science asks two 
questions — ^what a thing is and does, and how it came to 
be ; and it seemed to him that theology had the necessary 
scientific data in the experiences and convictions of the 
Christian society, and also a feasible scientific task in 
attempting to trace these spiritual facts to their causes. 
The result was a theological system, which, while it failed 
to do full justice to the Christian conceptions of God and 
sin, at least worked back to Christ as the ultimate source 
of the Christian experiences, and reinstated Him at the 
centre of Christian thinking. In recent times much relevant 
material has been collected in the field of religious psycho- 
logy, and there has also been some talk among us of 
utilising it for progress in doctrine, but so far nothing 
constructive has emerged on these lines that remotely com- 
pares with the great systematic achievement which Schleier- 
macher handed on in Der Christliche Glauhe. 

A second theological school fell back on reason — not 
meaning by it the common sense of the Deists, but reason 
as it had taken body in modern German philosophy. The 
Hegelian philosophy, in particular, was welcomed as initi- 
ating the theologian into the deeper understanding of the 
Christian religion. Differences of opinion developed as to 
how much of the traditional doctrine of the Church was to 
be treated as kemeL how much as husk, but on the whole 
the more negative view prevailed, and found its exponents 
in Pfleiderer and Biedermann. There is no book in German 
which expounds the doctrines of a Christian Hegelianism 
with the lucidity and persuasiveness of Caird's Fundamental 
Ideas of Christianity ; but even this noble treatise, with its 
sounder content, seisms slight in comparison with the compre- 
hensive and systematic Christliche Dogmatik in which Bieder- 



374 GERMAN CULTURE 

mann sought according to his Kght to separate the temporary 
elements from the abiding substance of Christian doctrine. 

During the last quarter of the bygone century the 
dominant school of Dogmatic Theology was that which took 
its name from Ritschl, and whose traditions have been 
carried on with general fidelity by Herrmann and Harnack. 
Ritschl agreed with Schleiermacher to the extent of holding 
that the authentic doctrines of Christianity are at least 
corroborated in experience, but he gave his system more 
strength and stability than had resulted from the purely 
subjective method by emphasising the uniqueness of the 
revelation of God which was given in and through the 
Christ of history. He also agreed with the earlier thinker 
in proposing to exclude metaphysics from theology. More 
recently a school has arisen which calls itself historical 
(Religionsgeschichtliche Schule). Its general idea is that 
there is a constant element of religious sentiment and 
attitude, if not of ideas, which gives a unity to all chapters 
of genuine religious history, and that in the religious spirit 
theology may find some materials which can be worked up 
as doctrine. Under this impulse German scholars are be- 
ginning to occupy themselves with the field of Comparative 
Religion, which they had previously neglected on the principle 
that theology has no subject-matter save the Christian 
religion. Whether anything worth calling a theology will 
be achieved by this latest school remains to be seen. 

From the point of view of orthodox thought, whether 
Roman Catholic, Anglican, or Presbyterian, it is tempting to 
dismiss these doctrinal developments as mere examples of 
wasted ingenuity and presumptuous error. They would be 
in place, it is held, if the Church had the nature and fimction 
of an experimental station, but they are out of place in an 
institution which knows itself to be a sanctuary and a 
citadel. In literature and the arts fresh departments and 
novel creations are welcome, but in religion it is conceived 
that originality can only be spurious and dangerous. This 
feeling, it should be said, has been widely shared in the 



RELIGION 375 

Lutheran Church, which has given no reason for a sweeping 
identification of its thought with faithless and restless 
doctrinal innovation. At more than one stage of last 
century the confessional school of Lutheranism, which may 
be described as evangelical and moderately High Church, 
developed great intellectual activity and exercised, for a 
time, a powerful and widespread influence. It produced 
dogmatic treatises of orthodox doctrine — such as those of 
Philippi and Frank — in which the doctrinal materials were 
handled with the same scientific thoroughness and com- 
petency that mark the works of the greatest of the eclectic 
and radical masters. But apart from this compensation, it 
is well arguable that in the intellectual conditions of the 
present time there was ample room for new constructions 
which proceeded on the footing that Christian truth is 
supremely credible and important, while yet its essentials 
are in need of being restated and readapted to the under- 
standing and appreciation of modern minds. In our modem 
world men are no longer shut up to the alternatives of 
orthodox Christianity or Christian heresy: if they lapse 
from orthodoxy, there is the other likely enough alternative 
of travelling far from the Christian habitation into the 
realms of materialism or agnosticism. It may, therefore, 
well be thought to have been no small service to elaborate a 
variety of schemes of doctrine, which, even if they represented 
a defective and mutilated Christianity, at least maintained 
the Christian outlook upon the universe and destiny, and 
conserved simple elements of the Christian Gospel ; and all 
the more may this view be deemed justified when it is 
remembered that a meagre faith honestly held and lived tends 
to increase in strength and range, and that, in the realm of 
truth also, he who is faithful over a few things may look to 
be set over many things. 

II. THE LATTER-DAY CHURCH 

It remains to touch briefly upon the life and work of 
the German Church in its Lutheran form. The ecclesiastical 



376 GERMAN CULTURE 

institution in this case seems less impressive to an outsider 
than its theological activities — thus reversing the usual 
proportion and perspective — but the Lutheran Church still 
remains one of the greatest of the organised Christian 
societies, and it has a creditable record as a school of piety 
and character and as an instrument of Christian service. 

There has been in Germany, since the age of the Refor- 
mation, a large and staunch Roman Catholic minority. In 
Bavaria it includes two-thirds, in Prussia about one-third, 
of the population, while for the Empire as a whole it is 
considerably over one- third. The vitality and tenacity of 
German Catholicism are evidenced by the concourse in its 
churches, and the vogue of its pilgrimages, and still more 
by its abilit}^ to organise a political party which puts 
ecclesiastical interests first, and has sometimes been strong 
enough to hold the balance of political power. Its official 
organ had the courage, while the political unity was still 
an experiment, to describe the German Empire as a passing 
thunder-cloud. It emerged with prestige from the Kultur- 
kampfoi the seventies, in which Bismarck vainly attempted to 
restrict the Catholic ideal of spiritual freedom in the interests 
of the national ideal. The Vatican Council, with its decree 
of Papal Infallibility, seemed to threaten a second German 
schism, but the opposition failed to develop any great 
volume or energy. Nor has Modernism evoked the re- 
sponse which might have been expected from the wide 
outlook and the liberal instincts of the German mind. The 
Roman Catholic Church in Germany, it may be added, has 
taken the social problem on its conscience, and has shown 
itself fruitful of ideas in the field of social service. ^ 

The Protestant Church in its main body is Lutheran. 
In every kingdom and principality the Church is established 
and endowed according as the tradition is Protestant or 
Catholic, and there is also some measure of concurrent 
endowment. The Established Church of Prussia was con- 
solidated in the course of last century by the union of 

^ Rae, Contemporary Socialism, Ch. VII. 



RELIGION 377 

le Lutheran and Reformed sections of the community. 
The relation to the State is distinctly Erastian, the Church 
being subject to control in doctrine and worship by a 
department of State, and in some cases by the municipal 
authority. The arrangement is vicious in principle, and 
if it has been generally acquiesced in it is probably from a 
suspicion that if the Church had had fuller autonomy its 
scholars and thinkers would have been allowed less indi- 
vidual liberty. The ecclesiastical constitution of the 
Lutheran Church varies in detail, but may be roughly 
described as a modified Presbyterianism which finds room 
for the superintendent, and can even, as in Sweden, utilise 
the historic Episcopate. 

The membership of the Lutheran Church includes three 
well-marked classes. There is a body of devout and earnest 
people — conservative in doctrine, mystical in sympathy, 
strict in Ufe, guarding the pious customs of family-religion, 
and sensitive to the missionary obligation of the Church. 
While on the whole loyal to the national church, this group 
feels the need of additional inspiration and more positive 
teaching, and has overflowed into associations and gather- 
ings which breathe the spirit of Pietism or Methodism. 
The peasantry form a considerable part of the " churchly- 
minded " population, and their religion is of the type for 
which the Scottish Church formerly coined the name of 
Moderates. A third division calls itself modern, and posi- 
tive in varying degrees, and it finds itself able to combine 
the new light from science philosophy or criticism with the 
substance of the inherited Christian faith. 

On the other hand, the Lutheran Church has not the 
abounding life and vigour, nor does it possess the hold on 
the people at large, which might be inferred from the many 
millions reporting themselves " evangelical '' in the census 
returns. Habitual church-going is uncommon. Many who 
consider themselves good churchmen explain that they do 
not feel the need of it, and sometimes add that Protestant 
preachers do not offer as convincing reasons for church- 



878 GERMAN CULTURE 

attendance as those which are urged upon Roman Catholics. 
Attendance at Communion has also been markedly on the 
decUne. A recent report mentions as a typical instance 
that in a suburb in which the population doubled in sixteen 
years the number of persons communicating fell from 22 to 
10 per cent, in the same period. 

The alienation of the masses from the Church is admitted 
to have almost reached, in certain districts and social 
strata, the dimensions of a popular apostacy. The breach 
began, according to a careful and well-informed writer, in 
the attempt of the Government during a revolutionary 
period to exploit the influence of the Church in the interests 
of political reaction, "Since then a great body of our 
people has become and continues to be at least indifferent 
to the Church. More than this, it has brought religion 
itself into discredit. All that comes from the Church and 
the clergjnnan, no matter of what confession or school, is 
still to-day largely exposed to mistrust and far-reaching 
prejudices."^ Other causes have powerfully co-operated. 
The leaders of the Social Democratic party have commonly 
combined their criticism of the existing social order with 
a bitter attack on Christianity. "The great body of the 
popular orators of Socialism follow their lead in a diversified 
chorus. Everything must be dragged down into the dust 
— -Fatherland, Church, and faith — while the multitude 
applauds and often cannot contain itself for delight at the 
vulgar mockery of sacred things.'' ^ In addition, a vigorous 
and sustained propaganda was independently made on 
behalf of naturalistic doctrines in the period from Biichner 
to Haeckel, and though there are some symptoms of the 
spell being broken, Braasch declares it to be certain " that 
the missionary efforts of materialism have wrought great 
havoc in wide circles, and overlaid the inner life with a 
mildew of doubts which it is hard to remove." The failure 
of the Lutheran Church to hold the people, which is thus 
indicated, is, of course, partly due to the attractiveness of 

* Braascb, Religiose Strdmungen der Gegenwart, 



RELIGION 879 

a material gospel, and the plausibility of a creed which 
makes no demands on the unseen. But it may also be 
attributed in part to a want of energy on the part of the 
Church, which has never developed much pastoral effort, 
and which, though it strongly emphasizes one aspect of 
the priesthood of the laity, has had Httle success in creating 
the impression that membership implies an obligation of 
service, and in thus making the particular congregation to 
become a busy centre of Christ-like activities. 

But while the congregational life of the Lutheran Church 
may seem languishing and poor when judged by foreign 
standards, it would be altogether unjust to speak of the 
institution as barren in good works. The spiritual quicken- 
ing of the nineteenth century engendered a zeal and energy 
for Christian service which found expression in the support 
of Foreign Missions, and especially in the creation of manifold 
agencies for coping with the spiritual and material distress of 
the homeland. The contribution of Germany to the Foreign 
Mission Enterprise of Protestant Christianity is noteworthy 
in respect both of the admirable training which is provided 
for its agents, and of the efficiency and economy with which 
its operations are conducted in the foreign fields. More 
notable still has been the development of what is called 
the " interior mission." The work of the " Innere Mission " 
was not organised directly by the Church, but was entrusted 
to voluntary societies which were supported by the Church's 
liberality, and which placed at its service trained social 
workers of every kind. The great names of the movement 
are Wichern, FUedner, and Bodelschwingh. The machinery 
includes institutes for the training of teachers and deacon- 
esses, orphanages, reformatories, clubs for young men and 
women, labour homes and labour colonies. There are also 
special schemes for dealing with the widespread evils of 
drunkenness and immorality. All in all it forms a wise and 
noble continuation of the work of the Good Samaritan. 
The Christian spirit, it should be added, has also worked 
effectually through the machinery of the State. The 



380 GERMAN CULTURE 

paternal legislation of Imperial Germany which made a 
universal provision against accidents and old age was 
launched under the name of Practical Christianity, and 
with the promise that it would be followed by other measures 
of social reform conceived in the spirit of Christ. " I 
frankly confess/' said Bismarck, in a speech delivered in 
the Reichstag in 1882, " that my faith in the ethical maxims 
of our revealed religion is decisive for me in this question and 
also decisive of the attitude of my imperial master. I, the 
minister of this State, am a Christian, and I am resolved 
to act as such, and as I can justify my action before God/' 

We have thus passed in review the main features of the 
spiritual achievement of modem Germany. The century 
of the Reformation will remain the classic age of German 
religion, alike because of its stronger faith and of the 
impressive definiteness of its religious thinking ; but the^ 
Germany of the nineteenth century, replenished as it was 
with fresh spiritual experiences, and endowed with a 
passion for truth and the most extraordinary intellectual 
thoroughness, for the second time was able to establish 
a title to religious fame. The creative spirit which bloweth 
as it listeth to quicken the life of humanity gave to 
the peoples of the west during the last century an unusual 
capacity for zeal and devotion in noble causes, and also an 
unwonted number of men of genius and of first-rate talent ; 
and Germany, receiving its full share of this benefaction, 
dedicated at least a tithe of it to the business of religious 
thought and service. But if the recent German period is 
to be reckoned one of the outstanding periods in the history 
of religion, the further question is raised in the light of past 
experience as to how far it may have run its course. There 
is a principle of economy which governs the operations of 
the quickening spirit, so that while it may lavishly furnish 
the inspiration and the power that are needed for a new 
beginning, it does not undertake to promote continuous 
progress, or even to ensure the maintenance of the highest 



RELIGION 881 

level that has been reached. In science advance may be 
fairly steady, and ground that has been won may be easily 
kept, but it is different in the aesthetic sphere, and still 
more in the realms which belong to the moral and spiritual 
life of man. In these regions every fresh outburst of life 
and thought tends to traverse the stages of growth, perfec- 
tion, and decay — though the season of decay doubtless has 
compensation in the gathering of fruit, and in the enrichment 
of the soil with fallen leaves against another spring. And 
the evidence has been accumulating that the movement of 
the German spirit which made its distinctive contribution 
to the greatness of the nineteenth century, has entered 
upon a phase of declension if not of decadence. 

The new religious period began in the deepening and quick- 
ening of the spiritual life of the people, but in the course of 
the century its soul developed a markedly different temper. 
The consolidation of the German Empire tended to replace 
religion by patriotism, and the extraordinary economic de- 
velopment that ensued fostered a materialistic spirit which 
to some extent overwhelmed the mystical and idealistic 
elements of the spiritual patrimony. Reference has al- 
ready been made to the inroads made upon the Christian 
faith and conscience by the anti-religious propaganda. 
One of the strongest and noblest souls, writing at the close 
of the century, summed up with a heavy heart on the 
contrast between the early promise and the later fulfilment. 
"The spring is without doubt over and gone. The sun 
which we saw rise is dropping in the west. The fields once 
richly irrigated, in which a noble seed sprouted forth, have 
gradually become more parched and withered. There have 
been fruits, noble and fair, but not what we looked for from 
the promise of the blossom.'' ^ 

Parallel with this decay of religious life there has been 
a downward trend in the intellectual activities which may 
be comprehensively conceived as spiritual genius. There is, 
indeed, ground for saying that this declension was a general 

^ Frank, Neuere Theolo^ie^ p. 266. 



882 GERMAN CULTURE 

European phenomenon — that men of the largest mould 
became fewer, and that we had to be content with cleverness 
in place of genius, while mankind at large became more 
conscious of its interests than of its privileges and duties. 
But in any case Germany perhaps most clearly exemplifies 
the waning power of the spirit. By all analogy the mighty 
deeds of modem Germany, coincident as they were with the 
opening up by science of the most thrilling vistas of time and 
space, should have inspired another great literary age, but 
although forty years have elapsed since it received the new 
inspiration, Germany has scarcely produced in the period a 
poet or a novelist whose name is even known by hearsay in 
other lands. In the Arts it would also appear that the 
inspiration has failed. Passing to Philosophy, which, in 
Germany, has always kept in close touch with religion, the 
descending scale has been very marked in respect both of 
spirit and achievement. It was a long descent from the 
moral rigour of Kant, and from the majestic sweep of 
Hegel's speculative philosophy, to the pessimism and 
cynicism of Schopenhauer, and still further to the level at 
which Haeckel was hailed as a philosopher and Nietzsche as 
a prophet. In the realm of Theology the Ritschlian School, 
the latest of capital importance, may be held in real respect 
and yet be judged to have been the most pedestrian of the 
succession which began with Schleiermacher. In the his- 
torical branches of theology research proceeds with im- 
abated industry, and there has been a growth in pointedness, 
and also a marked improvement in literary style, but the 
library of the monumental books has scarcely been added 
to for two decades, the figures of Wellhausen and Hamack 
that rank with the giants of the past belong to the older 
generation, and on the whole the men and the work of 
the period may be said to exhibit the characteristics which 
the Germans are wont to describe in other connections as 
those of the Epigoni, the posterity and the foil of the heroes. 
The religious development of Germany in the imme- 
diate future will be watched with intense interest. There 



RELIGION 583 

are many circumstances which seem to point towards a 
climax of religious apostacy — especially the aggressiveness 
of anti-Christian modes of thought and secular ideals, and 
the evidence of lessening power of resistance from the 
Christian side. The present war also contains the con- 
ditions of a popular religious crisis. For the Kaiser, with 
the support at least of the aristocracy and the officials, 
has appealed to the Almighty as the trusted protector of a 
chosen people ; and if the issue should prove to be an 
overwhelming disaster the religious consequence may well 
be that, like Israel of old when the God of history disap- 
pointed its hopes, it will be disposed to seek for another 
and a mightier divinity. More probably the result would 
be a return to the position of the old-world northmen for 
whom Gauka Thor spoke when he confessed that ** he and 
his comrade were neither Christians nor heathens, but 
trusted to their own courage, strength, and fortune, with 
which until then they had had every reason to be satis- 
fied." ^ On the other hand, in the religious sphere the 
operative laws deal out much of the unexpected and 
the paradoxical. For a nation the religious consequences, 
whether of prosperity or of adversity, are on the whole in- 
calculable. It is a weighty consideration that history shows 
the German people to be susceptible of a deep stirring of its 
spiritual life by the mysterious influences which surge up 
out of the depths, and the quite probable recurrence of 
such an experience would again, as in the past, sweep 
away the negations of the irreligious interval, and furnish 
the materials of a new if simplified Christian creed. But 
again, this historical probability might be crossed by the law 
of which our Lord made mention when He spoke of '* the 
day of visitation " that may not return. '* Our Lord 
God," said Luther in his table-talk, " deals with countries 
and cities as I do with an old hedge-stake when it dis- 
pleases me : I pluck it up and bum it and stick another in 
its stead." To the same effect he elsewhere warned his 

^ Pigott, Scandinavian Mythology^ p. 26. 



884 GERMAN CULTURE 

people to buy while the market was open, to gather in while 
the weather was fine, to use the grace and the word of God 
while it was with them. " For this ye must know, my 
beloved Germans, that the word and grace of God is a 
shower of rain which drives across a district, but does 
not come back to where it was. Once it was with the 
Jews, but it is gone, and now they have nothing. Paul 
brought it to Greece : it is gone, and now they have the 
Turk over them. Rome and the Latin land also had it : 
it is gone, and now they have the Pope. And you 
Germans may not think that you will have it always, for 
unthankfulness and contempt will not suffer it to abide 
with ' you. Wherefore let him who can, grip it and 
hold it fast ; for idle hands there will come an evil 
time." ^ " If you perish," said Fichte, thinking of the same 
menace of spiritual decay and death, " the whole of 
humanity perishes with you, and without hope of a future 
resurrection." ^ The law of the irrecoverable opportunity, 
however, we may well hope, is less inexorable than Luther 
thought ; and the fears of Fichte as to the wider conse- 
quences seem to be overpitched even if, in the history of 
the world which a German has called the judgment of the 
world, the candlestick of Germany should for a season be 
removed out of its place. 

^ An die Burgermeister und Rathskerren allcrlei Stddte in deutschen 
Landen. 

* Reden an die deutsche Nation, 



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